Summer is the time to sink into a new book -- these novels will carry you near and far with captivating historical settings.
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors.
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly * CNN * Harper's BAZAAR * E! Online * Refinery 29 * Bustle * Shondaland * Vulture * The Millions * Lit Hub * Electric Literature * Parade * MSN * and more! "For when you want a coming-of-age novel with a dark twist. In this provocative novel, the past isn't always as far away as you think." --The Skimm With the emotional power of Normal People and the reflective haze of The Girls, a magnetic novel that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a British boarding school in the 1990s, exploring the destructive relationships between teenage girls. Can we ever really escape our past? The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn't spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace. Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit.
In 1976, Tomas is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he's moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. As the oppressive regime's thuggish milicos begin to disappear more and more people like her, she presents Tomas with a way to prove himself. But what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? Years later a summons arrives for him where he now lives in New York. But it isn't a homecoming that awaits him so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he's become and who he once aspired to be.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named Most Anticipated of 2021 by Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Hello! magazine, Oprah.com, Bustle, Popsugar, Betches, Sweet July, and GoodReads! March 2021 Indie Next Pick and #1 LibraryReads Pick "A bold, edgy, accomplished debut!" --Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network A forgotten history. A secret network of women. A legacy of poison and revenge. Welcome to The Lost Apothecary... Hidden in the depths of eighteenth-century London, a secret apothecary shop caters to an unusual kind of clientele. Women across the city whisper of a mysterious figure named Nella who sells well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives.
For fans ofLilac Girls, the next powerful novel from the author of Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalistThe Two-Family House about two sisters working in a WWII armory, each with a deep secret. "Loigman's strong voice and artful prose earn her a place in the company of Alice Hoffman and Anita Diamant, whose readers should flock to this wondrous new book."--Pam Jenoff,New York Times bestselling author ofThe Orphan's Tale "The Wartime Sisters shows the strength of women on the home front: to endure, to fight, and to help each other survive." --Jenna Blum,New York Times and international bestselling author ofThe Lost Family andThose Who Save Us Two estranged sisters, raised in Brooklyn and each burdened with her own shocking secret, are reunited at the Springfield Armory in the early days of WWII. While one sister lives in relative ease on the bucolic Armory campus as an officer's wife, the other arrives as a war widow and takes a position in the Armory factories as a "soldier of production."
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2019 Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, delivers her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril's son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility and the forthcoming novel The Lincoln Highway, a story about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel--a beautifully transporting novel. The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin.
AN INSTANTNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
"Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded"--The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD * "A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress."--Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means "slave girl," she begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the author of American Wife and Eligible . . . He proposed. She said no. And it changed her life forever. "A deviously clever what if."--O: The Oprah Magazine "Immersive, escapist."--Good Morning America "Ingenious."--The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker * NPR * The Washington Post * Marie Claire * Cosmopolitan (UK) * Town & Country * New York Post In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she's attending Yale Law School, and she's on the forefront of student activism and the women's rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced. In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton. But in Curtis Sittenfeld's powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas.
"Masood's novel presents a stereoscopic, three-dimensional view of contemporary Muslim America: the way historical conflict in the Middle East lingers in individual lives, the way gossip travels in a close-knit immigrant community." The New York Times Book Review Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America. It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. As fundamentalism takes root within the social order and the zealots next door attempt to make Islam great again, his family decides, not quite unanimously, to start life over in California. Ironically, Anvar's deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother adjust easily to life in America, while his fun-loving father can't find anyone he relates to. For his part, Anvar fully commits to being a bad Muslim.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's converge. Doerr's "stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors" (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer "whose sentences never fail to thrill" (Los Angeles Times).
"One of the most dazzling and devastating novels I've read in a long time...Readers of Fruit of the Drunken Tree will surely be transformed." --San Francisco Chronicle "Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende...Listen to this new author's voice -- she has something powerful to say." --Entertainment Weekly A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE The "devastatingly moving" (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented Named One of Paste's Best Novels of the Decade * Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR * One of Time's Ten Best Novels of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * One of O: The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of the Year February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo--a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.
The New York Times bestseller with more than 1 million copies sold worldwide Inspired by the incredible true story of one Jewish family separated at the start of World War II, determined to survive--and to reunite--We Were the Lucky Ones is a tribute to the triumph of hope and love against all odds. "Love in the face of global adversity? It couldn't be more timely." --Glamour It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD "Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you." --The Boston Globe In 1580's England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this "exceptional historical novel" (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people.
New York Times bestseller * Six starred reviews At once provocative, terrifying, and darkly subversive, Dread Nation is Justina Ireland's stunning vision of an America both foreign and familiar--a country on the brink, at the explosive crossroads where race, humanity, and survival meet. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania--derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever. In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities--and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It's a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society's expectations.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER GoodReads Choice Awards Semifinalist "Moving . . . a plot that surprises and devastates."--New York Times Book Review "A masterful epic."--People magazine "Mesmerizing . . . The Women in the Castle stands tall among the literature that reveals new truths about one of history's most tragic eras."--USA Today Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined--an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband's ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband's brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin's mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister's wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband's resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart.
One of Glamour's Best Books of the Year An Entertainment Weekly Must-Read A stunning, lyrical novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians about a young girl and the family truths that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a white mother and a Cherokee father, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit in the rural town of Breathed, Ohio, is one of poverty and violence--both from outside the family and, devastatingly, from within. The lush landscape, rich with birdsong, wild fruit, and blazing stars, becomes a kind of refuge for Betty, but when her family's darkest secrets are brought to light, she has no choice but to reckon with the brutal history hiding in the hills, as well as the heart-wrenching cruelties and incredible characters she encounters. Despite the hardships she faces, Betty is resilient.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST "Bennett's tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it's especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye." --Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal "A story of absolute, universal timelessness ...For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be...." - Entertainment Weekly From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
"This stunning novel is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of two African-American women connected by blood but divided by time: a biracial single mom in 2017 and a former sharecropper turned farm-owning widow in 1924" as they discover the dangers that threaten to upend their lives transcend generations (The New York Times Book Review, A Notable Book of the Year). In 1924, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family. Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays Ava to be her companion.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post * NPR * Entertainment Weekly * Real Simple * Marie Claire * New York Public Library * LibraryReads * The Skimm * Lit Hub * Lit Reactor AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A captivating family saga."--The New York Times Book Review "This literary family saga is perfect for fans of Celeste Ng and Donna Tartt."--People Magazine (Book of the Week) If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life? It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die.
In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a heartbreaking coming of age story and a surprising murder investigation. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens's debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the pages of Vogue to the runways of Paris, this "captivating" (Time) memoir by a legendary style icon captures the fashion world from the inside out, in its most glamorous and most cutthroat moments. "The Chiffon Trenches honestly and candidly captures fifty sublime years of fashion."--Manolo Blahnik NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * Fortune * Garden & Gun * New York Post During André Leon Talley's first magazine job, alongside Andy Warhol at Interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship with the enigmatic, often caustic designer. Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's Women's Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta).
Now that high school is over, Ari is dying to move to the big city with his ultra-hip band, if he can just convince his dad to let him quit their struggling family bakery. Though he loved working there as a kid, Ari cannot fathom a life wasting away his days over rising doughs and hot ovens. But in the midst of interviewing candidates for his replacement, Ari meets Hector, an easy-going guy who loves baking as much as Ari wants to escape it. As they become closer over batches of breads, love begins to bloom . . . that is, if Ari doesn't ruin everything.Writer Kevin Panetta and artist Savanna Ganucheau concoct a delicious recipe of intricately illustrated baking scenes and blushing young love, where the choices we make can have terrible consequences, but the people who love us can help us grow.
Adam Silvera reminds us that there's no life without death and no love without loss in this devastating yet uplifting story about two people whose lives change over the course of one unforgettable day. #1 New York Times bestseller * 4 starred reviews * A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year * A Kirkus Best Book of the Year * A Booklist Editors' Choice of 2017 * A Bustle Best YA Novel of 2017 * A Paste Magazine Best YA Book of 2017 * A Book Riot Best Queer Book of 2017 * A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of the Year * A BookPage Best YA Book of the Year On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They're going to die today. Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they're both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There's an app for that. It's called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure--to live a lifetime in a single day. In the tradition of Before I Fall and If I Stay, They Both Die at the End is a tour de force from acclaimed author Adam Silvera, whose debut, More Happy Than Not, the New York Times called "profound." Don't miss Adam Silvera's bestselling fantasy duology, Infinity Son and Infinity Reaper!
Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He's about to take his first-ever trip to Iran, and it's pretty overwhelming-especially when he's also dealing with clinical depression, a disapproving dad, and a chronically anemic social life. In Iran, he gets to know his ailing but still formidable grandfather, his loving grandmother, and the rest of his mom's family for the first time. And he meets Sohrab, the boy next door who changes everything. Sohrab makes sure people speak English so Darius can understand what's going on. He gets Darius an Iranian National Football Team jersey that makes him feel like a True Persian for the first time. And he understand that sometimes, best friends don't have to talk. Darius has never had a true friend before, but now he's spending his days with Sohrab playing soccer, eating rosewater ice cream, and sitting together for hours in their special place, a rooftop overlooking the Yazdi skyline. Sohrab calls him Darioush-the original Persian version of his name-and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he's Darioush to Sohrab. When it's time to go home to America, he'll have to find a way to be Darioush on his own.
** INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ** USA TODAY BESTSELLER WSJ BESTSELLER INDIE BOUND BESTSELLER From the show's creators comes the groundbreaking novel inspired by the hit Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen. Dear Evan Hansen, Today's going to be an amazing day and here's why... When a letter that was never meant to be seen by anyone draws high school senior Evan Hansen into a family's grief over the loss of their son, he is given the chance of a lifetime: to belong. He just has to stick to a lie he never meant to tell, that the notoriously troubled Connor Murphy was his secret best friend. Suddenly, Evan isn't invisible anymore--even to the girl of his dreams. And Connor Murphy's parents, with their beautiful home on the other side of town, have taken him in like he was their own, desperate to know more about their enigmatic son from his closest friend. As Evan gets pulled deeper into their swirl of anger, regret, and confusion, he knows that what he's doing can't be right, but if he's helping people, how wrong can it be?
Brody Fair has had enough of real life. Enough of the bullies on his block, of being second best to his genius brother, and of not fitting in at school or at home. Then one day he meets Nico. Colourful, confident and flamboyant, he promises to take Brody to Everland, a diverse magical place. A place where he can be himself, where there are no rules, time doesn't pass, and the party never ends. The only catch? It's a place so good, you could lose yourself and forget what's real.
Charlie Spring is in Year 10 at Truham Grammar School for Boys. The past year hasn't been too great, but at least he's not being bullied anymore, and he's sort of got a boyfriend, even if he's kind of mean and only wants to meet up in secret. Nick Nelson is in Year 11 and on the school rugby team. He's heard a little about Charlie--the kid who was outed last year and bullied for a few months--but he's never had the opportunity to talk to him. That is, until the start of January, in which Nick and Charlie are placed in the same form group and made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn't think he has a chance. But love works in surprising ways, and sometimes good things are waiting just around the corner..
The New York Times Bestselling story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal for fans of John Green, Jenny Offill, Emma Straub, and Rainbow Rowell "We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story." At first, Jude and her twin brother are NoahandJude; inseparable. Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude wears red-red lipstick, cliff-dives, and does all the talking for both of them. Years later, they are barely speaking. Something has happened to change the twins in different yet equally devastating ways . . . but then Jude meets an intriguing, irresistible boy and a mysterious new mentor. The early years are Noah's to tell; the later years are Jude's. But they each have only half the story, and if they can only find their way back to one another, they'll have a chance to remake their world.
"You have to read this." --Rainbow Rowell, bestselling author of Eleanor & Park In his follow-up to tthe New York Times bestselling author of Every Day, andDavid Levithan, coauthor of bestsellers Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with John Green) and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn), crafts a novel that the Los Angeles Times calls "open, frank, and ultimately optimistic." Based on true events--and narrated by a Greek Chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS--Two Boys Kissing follows Harry and Craig, two seventeen-year-olds who are about to take part in a 32-hour marathon of kissing to set a new Guinness World Record. While the two increasingly dehydrated and sleep-deprived boys are locking lips, they become a focal point in the lives of other teens dealing with universal questions of love, identity, and belonging. Named to the National Book Award Longlist A Lambda Literary Award Winner A Stonewall Honor Book "An intriguing, complex narrative with an unusual point of view...[and] a quality of retrospection that is rare (and refreshing) in YA literature." --The Washington Post
A New York Times, USA Today, and Indie bestseller! Critically acclaimed and bestselling authors Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera combine their talents in this smart, funny, heartfelt collaboration about two very different boys who can't decide if the universe is pushing them together--or pulling them apart. ARTHUR is only in New York for the summer, but if Broadway has taught him anything, it's that the universe can deliver a showstopping romance when you least expect it. BEN thinks the universe needs to mind its business. If the universe had his back, he wouldn't be on his way to the post office carrying a box of his ex-boyfriend's things. But when Arthur and Ben meet-cute at the post office, what exactly does the universe have in store for them . . . ? Maybe nothing. After all, they get separated. Maybe everything. After all, they get reunited. But what if they can't nail a first date even after three do-overs? What if Arthur tries too hard to make it work and Ben doesn't try hard enough? What if life really isn't like a Broadway play? But what if it is? What if it's us? Plus don't miss Yes No Maybe So, Becky Albertalli's and Aisha Saeed's heartwarming and hilarious new novel, or Infinity Son, the first book in Adam Silvera's epic new fantasy series, both coming in 2020!
Now a major motion picture: Love, Simon, starring Nick Robinson and Katherine Langford! William C. Morris Award Winner: Best Young Adult Debut of the Year * National Book Award Longlist "A remarkable gift of a novel."--Andrew Smith, author of Grasshopper Jungle "I am so in love with this book."--Nina LaCour, author of Hold Still "Feels timelessly, effortlessly now."--Tim Federle, author of Better Nate Than Ever "The best kind of love story."--Alex Sanchez, Lambda Award-winning author of Rainbow Boys and Boyfriends with Girlfriends Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he's pushed out--without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he's never met. Incredibly funny and poignant, this twenty-first-century coming-of-age, coming out story--wrapped in a geek romance--is a knockout of a debut novel by Becky Albertalli. And don't miss Becky Albertalli's The Upside of Unrequited or Leah on the Offbeat!
#1 New York Times bestseller! Goodreads Choice Award for the best young adult novel of the year! In this sequel to the acclaimed Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda--now a major motion picture, Love, Simon--we follow Simon's BFF Leah as she grapples with changing friendships, first love, and senior year angst. When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat--but real life isn't always so rhythmic. She's an anomaly in her friend group: the only child of a young, single mom, and her life is decidedly less privileged. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And even though her mom knows she's bisexual, she hasn't mustered the courage to tell her friends--not even her openly gay BFF, Simon. So Leah really doesn't know what to do when her rock-solid friend group starts to fracture in unexpected ways. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high. It's hard for Leah to strike the right note while the people she loves are fighting--especially when she realizes she might love one of them more than she ever intended. Plus don't miss Yes No Maybe So, Becky Albertalli's and Aisha Saeed's heartwarming and hilarious new novel, coming in 2020!
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush. . . . I loved every moment of this book." --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire's darkest hollows--those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl--sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER that is a *MUST-READ BOOK* for US WEEKLY, VOGUE, NPR, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, OPRAHMAG.COM, and more! What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales? When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius--his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined.
Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause--despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss--until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie's mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she's never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris--who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality--Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris's second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents' perfect relationship.
The sudden and powerful attraction between a teenage boy and a summer guest at his parents' house on the Italian Riviera has a profound and lasting influence that will mark them both for a lifetime.
"Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood. Follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible."
oWhen a cuddly Canadian comes to call, Yaichi-a single Japanese dad-is forced to confront his painful past. With his young daughter Kana leading the way, he gradually rethinks his assumptions about what makes a family. Renowned manga artist Gengoroh Tagame turns his stunning draftsmanship to a story very different from his customary fare, to delightful and heartwarming effect.o -Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home Yaichi is a work-at-home suburban dad in contemporary Tokyo, married to wife Natsuki, father to young daughter Kana. Their lives are suddenly upended with the arrival at their doorstep of a hulking, affable Canadian named Mike Flanagan, who declares himself the widower of Yaichi's estranged gay twin, Ryoji. Mike is on a quest to explore Ryoji's past, and the family reluctantly but dutifully takes him in. What follows is an unprecedented, revelatory look at and journey into the largely still-closeted Japanese gay culture- how it's been affected by the West, and how the next generation has the chance to change the preconceptions of and prejudices against it. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout; part of the Pantheon Graphic Novel series)
Vulture/NY Magazine's BestComics of 2018 Asurprisingly honest and touching account of a trans girl surviving through sexwork in Seattle. With excerpts published in Eisner nominated anthology ISLAND,the full colour volume, drawn and painted by Remy Boydell is an unflinchingdebut graphic novel. Written by Michelle Perez
"May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and are instrumental in its future success." Visit here for more.
And please check out our virtual display of documentaries, fiction, and nonfiction by and about Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences. Many can be accessed online, but if you find print material you are interested in, you can place a hold in our catalogue by clicking on the title, and you will received an email notification when the material is ready for pickup.
Five-part documentary produced by PBS
This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation.
Breaking Ground
In an era of U.S. expansion, new immigrants arrive from China, India, Japan, the Philippines and beyond. Eventually barred by anti-Asian laws, they become America’s first “undocumented immigrants.”
A Question of Loyalty
An American-born generation straddles their birth country and their familial homelands in Asia. Family loyalties are tested during WWII, when Japanese Americans are held in detention camps and brothers are on opposite sides of the battle.
Good Americans
During the Cold War years, Asian Americans are simultaneously heralded as a Model Minority, and suspected as the perpetual foreigner. It is also a time of ambition, as Asian Americans aspire for the first time to national political office.
Generation Rising
During a time of war and social tumult, a young generation fights for equality in the fields, on campuses and in the culture, and claim a new identity: Asian Americans. The aftermath of the Vietnam War brings new immigrants and refugees.
Breaking Through
At the turn of the millennium, Asian Americans have become the fastest growing population in the U.S. It is a time of tremendous change, as the country tackles urgent debates over immigration, race and economic disparity.
edited by Jonathan H.X. Lee and Christen T. Sasaki
Asian American History: Primary Documents of the Asian American Experience cultivates historical perspective through experiential and reflective learning. Designed to fill a content gap in general introductory books on the subject, this text shares documentary case studies of Asian immigrants struggling for the right to be fully American. These readings illustrate the dynamic, powerful, and divisive socially constructed nature of racial categories, as well as the legacy of colonialism that served as a foundation for the development of racial hierarchies.
Jonathan H.X. Lee holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.
Christen T. Sasaki earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Los Angeles and is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. -Amazon
edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American "settler complicities" and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
by Devi S. Laskar
When a woman—known only as Mother—moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American–born daughter of Bengali immigrants, she finds that her answer―Here―is never enough.
Mother's simmering anger breaks through one morning, when, during a violent and unfounded police raid on her home, she finally refuses to be complacent. As she lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, her thoughts race from childhood games with her sister and visits to cousins in India, to her time in the newsroom before having her three daughters, to the early days of her relationship with a husband who now spends more time flying business class than at home.
Drawing inspiration from the author's own terrifying experience of a raid on her home, Devi S. Laskar's debut novel explores, in exquisite, lyrical prose, an alternate reality that might have been.
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the ALA Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Nguyen's next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is one of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship. -Amazon
a documentary film produced by Samantha Chan
A filmmaker explores the life of her great-aunt, Jane Chung, an actress who made a career for herself at a time when Asian-Americans faced widespread racism in Hollywood. Working mostly in small parts and as an extra, Jane’s fifty-year career reflects many of the struggles and triumphs of the Asian-Americans working in the entertainment industry. Jane had parts in over fifty films and TV shows including Chinatown, When Harry Met Sally, M*A*S*H and I Love Lucy, but much of her work is uncredited. The filmmaker's journey to uncover Jane’s many film and TV roles brings together voices from multiple generations of her family, as she seeks out those who remember Jane best. Through the story of Jane Chung’s life and career, More Than a Face in the Crowd reveals a larger untold story of Asian-American actors and extras in Hollywood.
by
A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.
In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.
They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
by Mary-Kim Arnold
Litany for the Long Moment is an assemblage of concise and poetic responses to unanswerable questions grounded in memory's combining powers, and in the pronouncements and obscurities of the personal archive and public document. It is a work that seeks to retrieve impossible-to-access reality, which extends through and beyond the singular experiences of poverty and diaspora of the author's early Korean life and unforeseeable future trauma in the American world of the new mother. Arnold's deft employment of commonplace items, such as a graph of the Hangul alphabet or the Korean television program questionnaire, which she uses as a compositional prompt throughout the essay, guides the reader through a terrain of never-settled fact, difficult desire, and obscurity of persons and histories that animate her excursion into zones of personal and philosophical doubt.
by Kai Cheng Thom
This extraordinary poetry collection journeys to the place where forgotten ancestors live and monstrous women roam—and where the distinctions between body, land, and language are lost. In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Thom draws from both memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk, Thom's debut collection is evocative and unforgettable. -Amazon
by Sharmila Sen
At the age of 12, Sharmila Sen emigrated from India to the U.S. The year was 1982, and everywhere she turned, she was asked to self-report her race: on INS forms, at the doctor's office, in middle school. Never identifying with a race in the India of her childhood, she rejects her new "not quite" designation: not quite white, not quite black, not quite Asian, and spends much of her life attempting to blend into American whiteness. But after her teen years trying to assimilate, watching shows like General Hospital and The Jeffersons, dancing to Duran Duran and Prince, and perfecting the art of Jell-O no-bake desserts, she is forced to reckon with the hard questions: What does it mean to be white, why does whiteness retain the magic cloak of invisibility while other colors are made hypervisible, and how much does whiteness figure into Americanness?
On the heels of the breakout success of his film "Crazy Rich Asians," director Jon M. Chu reflects on what drives him to create -- and makes a resounding case for the power of connection and on-screen representation.
by Chen Chen
In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.
by Mengchu Ling
Slapping the Table in Amazement is the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai'an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), originally published in 1628. The forty lively stories gathered here present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society and include characters from all social levels. We learn of their joys and sorrows, their views about life and death, and their visions of the underworld and the supernatural.
Ling was a connoisseur of popular literature and a seminal figure in the development of Chinese literature in the vernacular, which paved the way for the late-imperial Chinese novel. Slapping the Table in Amazement includes translations of verse and prologue stories as well as marginal and interlinear comments
edited by David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas
Writing Taiwan is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwan literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. In this collection, leading literary scholars based in Taiwan and the United States consider prominent Taiwanese authors and works in genres including poetry, travel writing, and realist, modernist, and postmodern fiction. The diversity of Taiwan literature is signaled by the range of authors treated, including Yang Chichang, who studied Japanese literature in Tokyo in the early 1930s and wrote all of his own poetry and fiction in Japanese; Li Yongping, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia and educated in Taiwan and the United States; and Liu Daren, who was born in mainland China and effectively exiled from Taiwan in the 1970s on account of his political activism.
Because the island of Taiwan spent the first half of the century as a colony of Japan and the second half in an umbilical relationship to China, its literature challenges basic assumptions about what constitutes a “national literature.” Several contributors directly address the methodological and epistemological issues involved in writing about “Taiwan literature.” Other contributors investigate the cultural and political grounds from which specific genres and literary movements emerged. Still others explore themes of history and memory in Taiwan literature and tropes of space and geography, looking at representations of boundaries as well as the boundary-crossing global flows of commodities and capital. Like Taiwan’s history, modern Taiwan literature is rife with conflicting legacies and impulses. Writing Taiwan reveals a sense of its richness and diversity to English-language readers.
a documentary film produced by Wichita Films
The United States entered WWII. More than 110,000 citizens of Japanese origin were rounded up and dispatched to camps until the end of the war. Hollywood was quick to react with films from OBJECTIVE BURMA to THE BRIDGE ON RIVER KWAI and THE STORY OF GI JOE to KNOW YOUR ENEMY: JAPAN. Already in 1941 Warner, who was manipulating public opinion in favor of entering the war, had released DIVE BOMBER with Errol Flynn. It showed very clearly that America was threatened from the Pacific region. In almost all of these films, the enemy is vilified, we see particularly ugly Japanese in THE FIGHTING SEABEE. With the arrival of the Cold War, the enemy image had to change quickly and Hollywood obliged; this is well explained in Naoko Shibusawa's The Geisha Ally. This program features interviews with film critic Joseph McBride, Reel Inequality author Nancy Wang Yuen, Japanese film history specialist Dan Akira, and more.
by Esther Kim Lee
In 1965, the first Asian American theatre company, the East West players, was founded by a group of actors who wanted to find better opportunities in the acting industry. Forty years later, Asian American theatre is one of the fastest-growing theatre sectors with over thirty active theatre companies and numerous award-winning artists such as Frank Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Ping Chong, David Henry Hwang, Philip Kan Gotanda, Velina Hasu, and B.D. Wong. Based on over seventy interviews, the book surveys the history of Asian American theatre from 1965 to 2005 with focus on actors, playwrights, companies, audiences, and communities. Emphasizing historical contexts, Esther Kim Lee examines how issues of cultural nationalism, interculturalism, and identity politics affect a racially defined theatre. Addressing issues ranging from actor's activism to Asian diaspora, the book documents how Asian American theatre has become an indispensable part of American culture.
edited by Hortense Gerardo
The Asian American Playwright Collective anthology of new works features seven short plays by award-winning playwrights based in Boston, Massachusetts. The collection features plays by Christina R Chan & Pata Suyemoto, Hortense Gerardo, Greg Lam, Michael Lin, Takeo Rivera, Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, and Livian Yeh.
by Chay Yew
Banned in his native Singapore, Chay Yew has been hailed as “a promising new voice in American theater” by Time magazine. With these two powerful, provocative plays, Yew first brought his startling and poetic voice to stages across America and abroad, exploring the battlegrounds, both internal and external, where matters of the heart conflict with barriers of race and sexuality. Porcelain is an examination of a young man’s crime of passion. Triply scorned — as an Asian, a homosexual, and now a murderer — 19-year-old John Lee has confessed to shooting his lover in a public lavatory in London. A winner of the London Fringe Award for Best Play, Porcelain dissects the crime through a prism of conflicting voices: newscasts, flashbacks, and John’s own recollections to a prison psychiatrist. A Language of Their Own is a lyrical and dramatic meditation on the nature of desire and sexuality as four men — three Asian and one white — come together and drift apart in a series of interconnected stories. A critical and popular success at New York’s Public Theater, it won both the George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award and the GLAAD Media Award for Best Play.
edited by Miles Xian Liu
In the late nineteenth century, Asian American drama made its debut with the spotlight firmly on the lives and struggles of Asians in North America, rather than on the cultures and traditions of the Asian homeland. Today, Asian American playwrights continue to challenge the limitations of established theatrical conventions and direct popular attention toward issues and experiences that might otherwise be ignored or marginalized. While Asian American literature came into full bloom in the last 25 years, Asian American drama has yet to receive the kind of critical attention it warrants. This reference book serves as a versatile vehicle for exploring the field of Asian American drama from its recorded conception to its present stage.
Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 52 Asian American dramatists of origins from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and China. Each entry includes relevant biographical information that contextualizes the works of a playwright, an interpretive description of selected plays that spotlights recurring themes and plots, a summary of the playwright's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. The entries are written by expert contributors and reflect the ethnic diversity of the Asian American community. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography, which includes anthologies, scholarly studies, and periodicals. -Amazon
An unnamed narrator returns to her ancestral home in an environmentally depleted harbor city with a baby in her care. She has escaped from what she calls "the breach"--the collapse of the climate-controlled domed city where she grew up. From a thread about the narrator's childhood, we learn that the breach was caused by the hysterical growth of the genetically-modified trees in the domed city, a growth which is spreading over the earth. From a thread about the history of the harbor city, we learn of an ancient war that was fought there. In the thread which follows the narrative present, there is a storm which floods the harbor city. The narrator's mother disappears and the baby falls ill. The narrator then journeys to city's river to preform the funeral rites for her mother and cure the baby. At the river, the three narrative threads come together.
by Celeste Ng
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
by Celeste Ng
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster. -Amazon
an episode of Now Read This, produced by NewsHour Productions
Celeste Ng, author of "Little Fires Everywhere," and Maxine Hong Kingston, author of "The Woman Warrior," join Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about our August pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This. Ng selected "The Woman Warrior," which was published by Kingston in 1976.
by Maxine Hong Kingston
In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present. -Amazon
by Eleanor Ty
Eleanor Ty's bold exploration of literature, plays, and film reveals how young Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have struggled with the ethos of self-sacrifice preached by their parents. This new generation's narratives focus on protagonists disenchanted with their daily lives. Many are depressed. Some are haunted by childhood memories of war, trauma, and refugee camps. Rejecting an obsession with professional status and money, they seek fulfillment by prioritizing relationships, personal growth, and cultural success. As Ty shows, these storytellers have done more than reject a narrowly defined road to happiness. They have rejected neoliberal capitalism itself. In so doing, they demand that the rest of us reconsider our outmoded ideas about the so-called model minority.
by Ocean Vuong
In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these poems seek a myriad existence without forgetting the prerequisite of self-preservation in a world bent on extinguishing its othered voices. Vuong's poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers. -Amazon
by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. -Amazon
documentary series produced by PBS
Restaurateur, Fresh off the Boat author and television host Eddie Huang guides us through his unique path to the American Dream. Through the eyes of a first-generation Asian American, the former t-shirt hustler turned business mogul tracks the influence of his family and the cultural significance of food that led to his ultimate success.
by Wesley Yang
One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade’s worth of cult-reputation essays―it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.
In his celebrated and prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine’s popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today’s Internet-mediated dating lives.
Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.
by Larissa Lai
In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixteen years—a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by the male-dominated Salt Water City, goes to war against disease, technology, and powerful men that threaten them with extinction.
Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover Peristrophe is a “starfish,” a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to Salt Water City, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a group of powerful men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body.
Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative, The Tiger Flu is at once a female hero’s saga, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale—a striking metaphor for our complicated times.
by Sandhya Menon
Dimple Shah has it all figured out. With graduation behind her, she’s more than ready for a break from her family, from Mamma’s inexplicable obsession with her finding the “Ideal Indian Husband.” Ugh. Dimple knows they must respect her principles on some level, though. If they truly believed she needed a husband right now, they wouldn’t have paid for her to attend a summer program for aspiring web developers…right?
Rishi Patel is a hopeless romantic. So when his parents tell him that his future wife will be attending the same summer program as him—wherein he’ll have to woo her—he’s totally on board. Because as silly as it sounds to most people in his life, Rishi wants to be arranged, believes in the power of tradition, stability, and being a part of something much bigger than himself.
The Shahs and Patels didn’t mean to start turning the wheels on this “suggested arrangement” so early in their children’s lives, but when they noticed them both gravitate toward the same summer program, they figured, Why not?
Dimple and Rishi may think they have each other figured out. But when opposites clash, love works hard to prove itself in the most unexpected ways.
by Xuan Juliana Wang
Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions.
In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces and stories of a new generation never before captured between the pages in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang’s surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy, as well as the contradictions of the modern immigrant experience in a way that feels almost universal. Home Remedies is, in the words of Alexander Chee, “the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we’ve been needing, waiting for maybe, without knowing.” -Amazon
by YZ Chin
In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: A grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl―and frustrated writer―transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia’s most notorious detention camp.
Winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, YZ Chin’s debut reexamines the relationship between the global and the intimate. Against a backdrop of globalization, individuals buck at what seems inevitable―seeking to stake out space for the inner motivations that shift, but still persist, in the face of changing and challenging circumstances. -Amazon
documentary film produced by PBS
The Registry profiles veterans of World War II who served in the Military Intelligence Service –a secret unit of mostly Japanese Americans – U.S. citizens who went into combat with the U.S. Army against the Japanese enemy in the Pacific. These veterans want to make sure their legacy lives on through the M.I.S. registry where all of their names have been recorded.
documentary series produced by American Public Television
Stories of Japanese-American Incarceration - Part 1
In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that cleared the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans in U.S. confinement camps. Men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were evicted from the West Coast of the United States and held in sites across the country.
Stories of Japanese-American Incarceration - Part 2
For more than 75 years, the story of Japanese Incarceration has been an untold chapter of American history. This documentary follows the politics of the country as WWII erupted — how American citizens of Japanese descent were affected, what their thoughts were in the face of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war with Japan, Germany and Italy.
documentary film produced by PBS
On May 6th, 1882—on the eve of the greatest wave of immigration in American history—President Chester A. Arthur signed into law a unique piece of federal legislation. Called the Chinese Exclusion Act, it singled out as never before a specific race and nationality for exclusion, making it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America, and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become citizens of the United States. It is a deeply American story about immigration and national identity, civil rights and human justice; about how we define who can be an American, and what being an American means. The film examines the economic, cultural, social, legal, racial and political dimensions of the law; the forces and events that gave rise to it; and the effect it had, and continues to have, on American culture and identity. The Chinese Exclusion Act explores in riveting detail this little known, yet deeply resonant and revealing episode in American history—one that sheds enormous light on key aspects of the history of American civil liberties, immigration, and culture—during one of the most formative periods of U.S. history.
Many thanks to Kailey Houle, Spring 2021 Access Services Intern, who designed and created this display.
In this electrifying novel, New York Times bestselling author and "an important voice in American literature" (Jada Pinkett Smith) Sister Souljah returns to the story of her beloved character, Midnight. Handsome, young, Muslim, and married to two women living in one house along with his mother, Umma, and sister, Naja: can Midnight manage all that he has on his plate? He is surrounded by Americans who don't share or understand his faith or culture, and adults who are offended by his maturity, intelligence, and his natural ability to make his hard work turn into real money. He is calm, confident, and cool, Ninja-trained and powerful, but one moment of rage throws this Brooklyn youth into a dark world of dirty police, gangs, guns, drugs, prisons, and dangerous inmates. Everything he ever believed, every dollar he ever earned, and all of the women he ever loved--including his mother--are at risk. Will his manhood be taken, broken, or altered? Can he maintain his faith? Outnumbered, overruled, and deeply envied--how can he possibly survive? Will the streets convert him? What can he keep? What must he lose?
One of . . . Electric Literature's "Most Anticipated Debuts of Early 2020" * O, The Oprah Magazine's "31 LGBTQ Books That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020" * Publishers Weekly's "Spring 2020 Literary Fiction Announcements" * BuzzFeed's "Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2020" * The Millions's "Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2020 Book Preview" * The Rumpus's "What to Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner" * LGBTQ Reads's "2020 LGBTQAP Adult Fiction Preview: January-June" * Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated Books of 2020" * BookRiot's "Must-Read Debut Novels of 2020" * Bitch's "27 Novels Feminists Should Read in 2020" * Harper's Bazaar's "14 LGBTQ+ Books to Look For in 2020" * NewNowNext's "11 Queer Books We Can't Wait to Read This Spring" * Cosmopolitan's "12 Books You'll Be Dying to Read This Summer" * Salon's "The Best and Boldest New Must-Read Books for May" * Lambda Literary's "Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of May 2020" * The Rumpus's "What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Mothers" "A queer tour-de-force . . . Compelling and astonishing."-Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause--despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss--until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie's mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she's never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris--who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality--Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris's second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents' perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall? Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, All My Mother's Lovers is the exciting debut novel from fiction writer and book critic Ilana Masad. A unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, All My Mother's Lovers challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.
Available in hardcover for the first time, a collection of cult sensation Jeremy Robert Johnson's best and most bizarre short fiction, including a brand-new, never-before-published novella. For more than a decade, Jeremy Robert Johnson has been bubbling under the surface of both literary and genre fiction. His short stories present a brilliantly dark and audaciously weird realm where cosmic nightmares collide with all-too-human characters and apocalypses of all shapes and sizes loom ominously. In "Persistence Hunting," a lonely distance runner is seduced into a brutal life of crime with an ever-narrowing path for escape. In "When Susurrus Stirs," an unlucky pacifist must stop a horrifying parasite from turning his body into a sentient hive. Running through all of Johnson's work is a hallucinatory vision and deeply-felt empathy, earning the author a reputation as one of today's most daring and thrilling writers. Featuring the best of his independently-published short fiction, as well as an exclusive, never-before-published novella "The Sleep of Judges"--where a father's fight against the denizens of a drug den becomes a mind-bending suburban nightmare--Entropy in Bloom is a perfect compendium for avid fans and an ideal entry point for adventurous readers seeking the humor, heartbreak, and terror of JRJ's strange new worlds. Table of Contents: An Introduction by Brian Evenson The League of Zeroes Persistence Hunting The Oarsman The Gravity of Benham Falls Dissociative Skills Snowfall When Susurrus Stirs Luminary Trigger Variation Cathedral Mother Swimming in the House of the Sea Saturn's Game The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line A Flood of Harriers States of Glass The Sleep of Judges
National Book Award Finalist! Instant New York Times Bestseller! The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meets Jane the Virgin in this poignant but often laugh-out-loud funny contemporary YA about losing a sister and finding yourself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican-American home. Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it's not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister's story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal? "Alive and crackling--a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner. "--The New York Times "Unique and fresh." --Entertainment Weekly "A standout." --NPR
Two lost sisters find family, and themselves, among the voices of an Ojibwe reservation When Loretta surrenders her young girls to the county and then disappears, she becomes one more missing Native woman in Indian Country's long devastating history of loss. But she is also a daughter of the Mozhay Point Reservation in northern Minnesota and the mother of Azure and Rain, ages 3 and 4, and her absence haunts all the lives she has touched--and all the stories they tell in this novel. In the Night of Memory returns to the fictional reservation of Linda LeGarde Grover's previous award-winning books, introducing readers to a new generation of the Gallette family as Azure and Rain make their way home. After a string of foster placements, from cold to kind to cruel, the girls find their way back to their extended Mozhay family, and a new set of challenges, and stories, unfolds. Deftly, Grover conjures a chorus of women's voices (sensible, sensitive Azure's first among them) to fill in the sorrows and joys, the loves and the losses that have brought the girls and their people to this moment. Though reconciliation is possible, some ruptures simply cannot be repaired; they can only be lived through, or lived with. In the Night of Memory creates a nuanced, moving, often humorous picture of two Ojibwe girls becoming women in light of this lesson learned in the long, sharply etched shadow of Native American history.
Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
A tale of violence, lofty ideals, and moral ambiguity, Fontaine's best-selling novel is now available in a superb English translation Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Vida Doble is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is impossible. Captured by agents of the Chilean repression, withstanding brutal torture to save her comrades, she must now either forsake the allegiances of motherhood or betray the political ideals to which she is deeply committed. Arturo Fontaine's Lorena is a study in contradictions--mother and combatant, intellectual and lover, idealist and traitor--and he places her within a historical context that confounds her dilemmas. Though she has few viable options, she is no mere victim, and Fontaine disallows any comfortable high moral ground. His novel is among the most subtle explorations of human violence ever written. Ranking with Roberto Bolaño and Mario Vargas Llosa on Latin America's roster of most accomplished authors, Fontaine is a fearless explorer of the most sordid and controversial aspects of Chile's history and culture. He addresses a set of moral questions specific to Pinochet's murderous reign but invites us, four decades later, to consider global conflicts today and question how far we've come.
This volume focuses on the ways in which mothers aremarginalized based on intersecting identities, such as immigration status,race, class, disability, sexuality, and how these women mother from the margins.Divided into three sections, this collection brings forth the voices andexperiences of mothers and highlights the institutions and laws thatmarginalize them. In the first section, mothersface barriers such as institutional constraints that block them from neededresources and the ability to mother as they see fit. In section two, contributors examine theborders of marginalized mothering - boundaries reflected through citizenship,walls, geography, dealings with intimate partners and welfare offices, or prisonbars. Readings in this section highlight mothers' efforts to transcend, resist,or even just survive experiences with borders. The final section centers on mothers that explicitly adopt motheringstrategies of resistance or explicitly use their status as mothers in theiractivism. Topics range from mothers who engage in milk sharing to mothers ofcolor whom organize against police brutality. Throughout the volume, contributors demonstrate the striking resilienceof these mothers, and their resistance in challenging the ideologies andinstitutions that marginalize them.
Provides a model for queering motherhood that resists racist, neoliberal, and hetero- or homonormative ideals of "good" mothering. Bridging the gap between feminist studies of motherhood and queer theory, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood articulates a provocative philosophy of queer kinship that need not be rooted in lesbian or gay sexual identities. Working from an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates feminist philosophy and queer, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Shelley M. Park offers a powerful critique of an ideology she terms monomaternalism. Despite widespread cultural insistence that every child should have one--and only one--"real" mother, many contemporary family constellations do not fit this mandate. Park highlights the negative consequences of this ideology and demonstrates how families created through open adoption, same-sex parenting, divorce, and plural marriage can be sites of resistance. Drawing from personal experiences as both an adoptive and a biological mother and juxtaposing these autobiographical reflections with critical readings of cultural texts representing multi-mother families, Park advocates a new understanding of postmodern families as potentially queer coalitional assemblages held together by a mixture of affection and critical reflection premised on difference. Shelley M. Park is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Central Florida.
Children's rights, lone motherhood and the breakdown of families are all issues at the forefront of current social debate in the West, with little agreement on what constitutes good parenting, or how the needs of both mother and child are best met. The feminist contribution to this debate is particularly important in keeping in view the diverse identities of all those who provide mothering. The psychoanalytic contribution is often undervalued and misunderstood. Mothering and Ambivalence brings together authors from therapeutic, academic and social work backgrounds to discuss dependency, anxiety and gender relations within families. Drawing on extensive professional experience the contributors combine a psychoanalytic and feminist approach to mothering which transcends the polarized and simplistic political debate about women's and children's needs. They also show how such an approach can inform and improve professional practice.
In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think a good mother should be, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college, and whether to stay in college or not. The first book length study to focus on the lives and experiences of single mothers who are college students, Mothering by Degrees points out how these women are influenced by dominant American ideologies of motherhood, and the institutional parameters of the schools they attend, and argues for increased attention to the specific ways in which the choices, challenges, and opportunities available to mothers are shaped within their specific environments, as well as the ways in which mothers help shape those environments.
The rise of the novel and of the ideal nuclear family was no mere coincidence, argues Susan C. Greenfield in this fascinating look at the construction of modern maternity. Many historians maintain that the eighteenth century witnessed the idealization of the caring, loving mother. Here Greenfield charts how the newly emerging novels of the period, in their increasing feminization, responded to and helped shape that image, often infusing it with more nuance and flexibility. By the end of the eighteenth century, she notes, novels by women about missing mothers and their suffering daughters abounded. Even as the political implications of the novels vary, the books uniformly insist on the tenacity of the mother-daughter bond despite the mother's absence. Exploring the historically contingent assumptions about maternal care that informed writers during this period, Greenfield argues that women's novels helped construct the story of mother love and loss that psychoanalysis would soon inherit.
Research into children and domestic violence in recent years has emphasized the importance of giving positive support to a non-abusive parent for effective child protection. But what exactly does positive support involve? Based on findings from six primary research studies carried out by the authors themselves, as well as other published research, this book reveals how undermining mothering - specifically, family courts and social work agencies blaming mothers for their own victimization - plays a key role in locking women into abusive relationships and exacerbating the damage done by domestic violence. It explores the principle message drawn from the research: that the needs of individual victims should inform risk assessment and safety planning by welfare practitioners. Case studies are used to explore key issues that should be considered during assessment and planning, such as the psychological impact on children of living in an abusive household; mother and child protection from an abusive partner during court proceedings; and child contact with an abusive parent. Mothering Through Domestic Violence is essential reading for practitioners working in the fields of family and child welfare, family courts and policy makers.
A 2012 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book This gorgeous picture book by Newbery Honor winner Patricia C. McKissack and two-time Caldecott Medal-winning husband-and-wife team Leo and Diane Dillon is sure to become a treasured keepsake for African American families. Set in West Africa, this a lyrical story-in-verse is about a young black boy who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and his father who is left behind to mourn the loss of his son. Here's a beautiful, powerful, truly unforgettable story about family, memory, and freedom. "Forceful and iconic," raves Publishers Weekly in a starred review.
In Rome one January afternoon in 1943, a young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. The war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return.Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman,winner of the prestigious Georg Büchner prize, is a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost--even at the risk of excluding reality. More than just the story of this single woman, it is a compelling and credible description of a typical young German woman during the Nazi era.
Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers-- immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs--Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work.
"The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly." --The New York Times Book Review Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop. Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It's there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity. This searing and heart-wrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society's ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice.
A powerful and groundbreaking revelation of the secret history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered children for adoption in the several decades before Roe v. Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Awaytells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roedecision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Awayis their story.
This widely acclaimed bestseller spans two countries and two generations, following a group of Chinese women who meet to play mah jong, invest money and tell the secret stories of their lives. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club.
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself. Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.
The acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries now gives us an electrifying stand-alone thriller that takes off into a sweeping international drama. January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjovallen, nineteen people have been massacred. The only clue is a red ribbon found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: her grandparents, the Andrens, are among the victims. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed the murders. But when Birgitta discovers the diary of another Andren--a gang master on the American transcontinental railway in the nineteenth century--that describes the cruel treatment of Chinese slave-workers, she is determined to uncover what she suspects is a more complicated truth. The investigation leads to modern-day Beijing and its highest echelons of power, to Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But the narrative also takes us back 150 years, into a history that will ensnare Birgitta as she draws ever closer to solving the Hesjovallen murders. This is Henning Mankell at the height of his powers.
Single or married, working mothers are, if not the norm, no longer exceptional. These days, women who stay at home to raise their children seem to be making a radical lifestyle choice. Indeed, the women at the center of The Paradox of Natural Mothering have renounced consumerism and careerism in order to reclaim home and family. These natural mothers favor parenting practices that set them apart from the mainstream: home birth, extended breast feeding, home schooling and natural health care. Regarding themselves as part of a movement, natural mothers believe they are changing society one child, one family at a time. Author Chris Bobel profiles some thirty natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women's traditional role. Bobel's subjects say that they have chosen to follow their nature rather than social imperatives. Embracing such lifestyle alternatives as voluntary simplicity and attachment parenting, they place family above status and personal achievement. Bobel illuminates the paradoxes of natural mothering, the ways in which these women resist the trappings of upward mobility but acquiesce to a kind of biological determinism and conventional gender scripts.
In 1939, on the eve of Hitler''s invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England. The two were given shelter by a jovial, upper-class British foster family with whom they lived for the next seven years. Edith chronicles these transformative experiences of exile and good fortune in "The Tiger in the Attic," a touching memoir of growing up as an outsider in a strange land. In this illuminating chronicle, Edith describes how she struggled to fit in and to conquer self-doubts about her German identity. Her realistic portrayal of the seemingly mundane yet historically momentous details of daily life during World War II slowly reveals istelf as a hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers. She paints an account rich with colorful characters and intense relationships, uncanny close calls and unnerving bouts of luck that led to survival. Edith''s journey between cultures continues with her final passage to AmericaOCoyet another chapter in her life that required adjustment to a new worldOCoallowing her, as she narrates it here, to visit her past as an exile all over again. "The Tiger in the Attic "is a literary gem from a skilled fiction writer, the story of a thoughtful and observant child growing up against the backdrop of the most dangerous and decisive moment in modern European history. Offering a unique perspective on Holocaust studies, this book is both an exceptional and universal story of a young German-Jewish girl caught between worlds. OC Adjectives like OCyaudaciousOCO and OCyeloquent, OCO OCyenchantingOCO and OCyexceptionalOCO require rationing. . . . But what if the book demands these terms and more? Such is the case with "The Tiger in the Attic," Edith MiltonOCOs marvelous memoir of her childhood.OCOOCoKerry Fried, "Newsday" OC Milton is brilliant at the small stroke . . . as well as broader ones.OCOOCoAlana Newhouse, "New York"" Times Book Review ""
The first book on foster care written from foster mothers' perspectives, They're All My Children voices the often painful experiences of contemporary U.S. foster mothers as they struggle to mother and care-work in the face of exploitative social relations with the state. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wozniak, herself a former foster mother and an anthropologist, presents and analyzes women's personal stories about fostering to reflect on the larger socio-cultural context of American family lifenamely, how we think about kinship, identity, and work. Foster mothers construct enduring kinship relationships with children, and often with the children's biological families. These relationships enhance children's chances to growth and thrive and in turn extend women's kin relationships into often distant and disparate communities. Wozniak also highlights the economic side of fostering to show how foster mothers are both mothers and workers; foster children are both providers and provided for, adored sentimental children and economic figures. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Wozniak argues that we have not gone far enough in understanding the experiences of these women whose life work lies outside the usual boundaries. Nor have child welfare gone far enough in revising the theories upon which child welfare policies are based. Foster mothers and their experiences challenge the patriarchal, nuclear family ideals upon which foster care programs are based, a challenge that They're All My Children takes forward.
Test A remarkable new novel, luminous with passion and mystery, from the incredible bestselling author of Seventh Heaven. Hoffman, one of the finest writers of her generation (Newsweek), transports readers to Florida--a place where anything can happen during the month of May. A transplanted New Yorker and her son have no idea what Verity holds in store for them.
These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure.
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milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
"Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." -- The New Republic From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one's roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself. Divided into five chapters and illustrated by kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as i wept think of those flowers you plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt fall root rise in order to bloom
Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book. #Not Your Princess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.
All the Women in My Family Sing is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity andbuild bridges to heal the brokenness in today's turbulent world.Sixty-nine authors -- African American, Asian American, Chicana, Native American, Cameroonian, South African, Korean, LGBTQI -- lend their voices to broaden cross-cultural understanding and to build bridges to each other's histories and daily experiences of life.America Ferrera's essay is from her powerful speech at the Women's March in Washington D.C.;Natalie Baszile writes about her travels to Louisiana to research Queen Sugar and finding the "painful truths" her father experienced in the "belly of segregation;"Porochista Khakpour tells us what it is like to fly across America under the Muslim travel ban;Lalita Tademy writes about her transition from top executive at Sun Microsystems to NY Times bestselling author.This anthology is monumental and timely as human rights and justice are being challenged around the world. It is a watershed title, not only written, but produced entirely by women of color, including the publishing, editing, process management, book cover design, and promotions. Our vision is to empower underrepresented voices and to impact the world of publishing in America -- particularly important in a time when 80% of people who work in publishing self-identify as white (as found recently in a study by Lee & Low Books, and reported on NPR).
Isra Shadi, a twenty-one-year-old woman of mixed Palestinian and white descent, lives in California with her paternal amu (uncle), amtu (aunt), and cousins after the death of her mother and abandonment by her father at a young age. Ever the outcast in her amu and amtu's household, they eagerly encourage Isra to marry and leave. After rejecting a string of undesirable suitors, she marries Yusef, an old love from her past. In Amreekiya, author Lena Mahmoud deftly juggles two storylines, alternating between Isra's youth and her current life as a married twentysomething who is torn between cultures and trying to define herself. The chapters chronicle various moments in Isra's narrative, including the volatile relationship of her parents and the trials and joys of forging a partnership with Yusef. Mahmoud also examines Isra's first visit to Palestine, the effects of sexism, how language affects identity, and what it means to have a love that overcomes unbearable pain. An exploration of womanhood from an underrepresented voice in American literature, Amreekiya is simultaneously unique and relatable. Featuring an authentic array of characters, Mahmoud's first novel is a much-needed story in a divided world.
Maya Angelou's unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters. Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies. I say, It's in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me. Thus begins "Phenomenal Woman," just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou's third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh--and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it. "It is true poetry she is writing," M.F.K. Fisher has observed, "not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity. . . . It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night . . . it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes."
SANTIAGO GARCIA and DAVID RUBIN unite to bring forward the myth of Beowulf,which has endured for a thousand years, inspired an epic poem, become afoundational piece of English literature, and influenced generations of authors:from J.R.R. Tolkien and Seamus Heaney to a multitude of Hollywoodscreenwriters. BEOWULF tells of the tale of a Scandinavian hero in landsthat would become what is now Denmark and Sweden. A monster, Grendel, hasarrived in the kingdom of the Danes, devouring its men and women for over adecade until Beowulf arrives to save them. GARCIA and RUBIN faithfullyfollow the original story for a new version that is neither revisionist norpostmodern, but captures the tone and important details of the poem, translatingits potent, epic resonance and melancholy into a contemporary comic that isn'tstandard swords and sorcery or heroic fantasy fare, but rather an ancient storywith a modern perspective that remains respectful of the sourcematerial.
Che on My Mind is an impressionistic look at the life, death, and legacy of Che Guevara by the renowned feminist poet and activist Margaret Randall. Recalling an era and this figure, she writes, "I am old enough to remember the world in which [Che] lived. I was part of that world, and it remains a part of me." Randall participated in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and eventually was forced to leave the country. She arrived in Cuba in 1969, less than two years after Che's death, and lived there until 1980. She became friends with several of Che's family members, friends, and compatriots. In Che on My Mind she reflects on his relationships with his family and fellow insurgents, including Fidel Castro. She is deeply admiring of Che's integrity and charisma and frank about what she sees as his strategic errors. Randall concludes by reflecting on the inspiration and lessons that Che's struggles might offer early twenty-first-century social justice activists and freedom fighters.
"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society". --- new 01.15.
An American in Moscow channels Russian poetic traditions
Dézafi is no ordinary zombie novel. In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frankétienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature to English-language readers for the first time. Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Dézafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner's daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the "dézafi" of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frankétienne's novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.
"Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle." --George R.R. Martin The works in this anthology reflect both the myth and the truth about the part of the United States we call the "West." Is there one "true" West? Or have the changes that are overwhelming most of the rest of the country so modified the West that there is little commonality? The editors of Different Roads believe, with Stephen R. Covey, that our "strength lies in differences, not in similarities" and are constantly amazed by what Stanley Baldwin calls "the many-sidedness of truth." Many sides of the truth of the West are represented in the anthology. Is everything here absolutely the truth? The reader must decide. Topics included in this collection of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction range from the West's diversity of landscape, people, languages, attitudes and history to discussions of water issues, wildfires, antiquities and a broad range of environmental concerns. Different Roads is the third volume in Western Press Books' literary anthology series Manifest West. The press, affiliated with with Western State Colorado University, annually produces one anthology focused on Western regional writing. The 2014 theme is Western diversity and the title Different Roads comes from George R.R. Martin's quote above.
A suicidal father looks to an older neighbor -- and the Cookie Monster -- for salvation and sanctuary as his life begins to unravel. A man seeking to save his estranged, drug-addicted brother from the city's underbelly confronts his own mortality. A chess match between a girl and her father turns into a master class about life, self-realization, and pride: "Now hold on little girl.... Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces." These are just a few glimpses into the world of the residents of the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, a largely black settlement founded in 1807 after the only successful slave revolt in the United States. Raw, edgy, and unrelenting yet infused with forgiveness, redemption, and humor, the stories in this collection explore characters suffering the quiet tragedies of everyday life and fighting for survival. In Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices -- choices of kindness or cruelty -- in the depths of darkness and hopelessness. Although Cross River's residents may be halted or deterred in their search for fulfillment, their spirits remain resilient -- always evolving and constantly moving.
Jew Boy is Alan Kaufman's riveting memoir of being raised by a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust. This pioneering masterpiece, the very first memoir of its kind by a member of the Second Generation is Kaufman's coming-of-age account, by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection. Throughout the course of his memoir, Kaufman touches on the pain, guilt, and confusion that shape the lives and characters of American-born children of Holocaust survivors. Kaufman struggles to comprehend what it means to be Jewish as he deals with the demons haunting his mother and attempts to escape his wretched home life by devoting himself to high school football. He eventually hitchhikes across the country, coming face-to-face with the phantoms he fled. Taking us from the streets of the Bronx to the highways of America, the kibbutzim and Israeli army to personal rebirth in San Francisco, and finally to a final reckoning in Germany, Jew Boy shines with the universal humanity of a brilliant writer embracing the gift of life. Kaufman's fierce passion will leave no reader untouched.
A girl afflicted with pyrokinesis tries to control her fire-starting long enough to go to a dance with a boy she likes. A woman trapped in a stalled marriage is excited by an alluring ex-con who enrolls in her YMCA cooking class. A teen accompanies her mother, a prestigious poet, to a writing conference where she navigates a misguided attraction to a married writer -- who is, in turn, attracted to her mother -- leaving her "inventing punishments for writers who believe in clichés as tired as broken hearts." In this affecting collection, Katie Cortese explores the many faces of love and desire. Featuring female narrators that range in age from five to forty, the narratives in Make Way for Her speak to the many challenges and often bittersweet rewards of offering, receiving, and returning love as imperfect human beings. The stories are united by the theme of desperate love, whether it's a daughter's love for a parent, a sister's for a sibling, or a romantic love that is sometimes returned and sometimes unrequited. Cortese's complex and multilayered stories play with the reader's own desires and anticipations as her characters stubbornly resist the expected. The intrepid girls and women in this book are, above all, explorers. They drive classic cars from Maine to Phoenix, board airplanes for the first time, and hike dense forests in search of adventure; but what they often find is that the most treacherous landscapes lie within. As a result, Make Way for Her explores a world of women who crave knowledge and experience, not simply sex or love.
More and more Americans find themselves in some way touched by the opioid epidemic. But while many have observed the effects of the crisis, Not Far from Me: Stories of Opioids and Ohio is the first book on this public health emergency composed entirely of first-person accounts. The collection unfolds across fifty gripping accounts by Ohioans at the center of the national epidemic. Shared through personal stories, poetry, interviews, and photos, these perspectives transcend typical one-dimensional portrayals of the crisis to offer a mosaic of how politics, religion, sports, economics, culture, race, and sexual orientation intersect in and around the epidemic. Themes of pain and healing, despair and hope are woven throughout accounts of families who have lost loved ones to addiction, stories of survival, and experiences of working on the front lines in communities. In an attempt to give every voice the chance to be heard, Not Far from Me features contributors from across the state as they engage with the pain of opioid abuse and overdose, as well as the hope that personal- and community-level transformation brings. Ultimately, Not Far from Me humanizes the battle against addiction, challenges the stigma surrounding drug users, and unflinchingly faces the reality of the American opioid epidemic.
The most appealing quality of the novel is its haunting and unusual prose that really ought to be termed poetry. But this is poetry with an added touch as it is also a narrative that weaves together many lives engrossed in the daily struggle for survival. There are no heroes or villains, just ordinary folk trying to make the most of extraordinary circumstances.
Writers, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges,Alice Munro, Quim Monzo or Cristina Fernandez Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel,has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own.This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernandez Cubas, Paloma Diaz-Mas, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero,Maruja Torres, Soledad Puertolas and Maria Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marse. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women's writingin contemporary Spain. With the original texts in Spanish as well as facing-page English translations, an Introduction, notes, and bio-bibliographical information on each author, this volume is a useful tool for students of the Spanish language and culture at all levels. It includes a selection ofsecondary reading on Spanish women writers and a selection of anthologies of Spanish short stories since 1997.
"A collection of short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, personal narratives, critical essays and visual art produced by cisgender and transgender bisexual, pansexual, polysexual and fluid men from the United States, Canada, Chile, India, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom."-- Publisher's description.
A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy and love. She knows boredom and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday and the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol and violence. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the animal world and the ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.
The skillfully rendered dramatic monologues of Karen Kotrba�s SHE WHO IS LIKE A MARE document the Remarkable history of the Frontier Nursing Service in eastern Kentucky in the early twentieth century. Through the imagined voices of the founder, Mary Breckinridge, and the nurse-midwives she trained to travel the back roads of Kentucky on horseback, Kotrba brings a whole community to life. With a sure command of the multiple tones and mixed dictions of the region, she gives voice to a wide range of characters: the local citizens who are protective of their mountain women who have always �birthed the babies�; the physicians who want to replace any kind of midwifery with the new medical field of obstetrics; the fathers who ride out in fierce storms to bring help to their wives in labor; and the mothers, the children, and even one amazing poem in the voice of a horse. With this book, Karen Kotrba joins the company of our great documentary poets: Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, the Muriel Rukeyser of U.S. 1, and West Virginia poet Louise McNeill. She has brought to light a little known piece of women�s history�a story of cunning, courage, and caring�and has done so with unforgettable imagery, beautiful music, and love. This is a book I want to keep near me and reread, to remind myself of what is still possible in poetry and in our lives. --Maggie Anderson
To this day, Emily Dickinson remains a beloved and enigmatic figure in American poetry. This "lady in white," who shut herself away from the world and found solace alone with her words, has since her death been viewed primarily through the lens of her poetry, which afforded her beauty and hope amid the agony and loneliness of her life. As a reclusive writer himself, contemporary French author Christian Bobin felt a kindred tie to the poet, and his book The Lady in White honors Dickinson in the form of a brief, poetically imagined account of her life and the work that she gave the world. This fresh and personal interpretation of Dickinson's life leaves one with an impression of knowing Dickinson both through her poetry, as recalled by Bobin, and as he senses the person she was through her work and the sparse facts we have about her life.
Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she doesn't know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can't stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. "Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice." --Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation "An incredibly potent debut." --Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost "Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero." --Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street
Deeply affecting and diverse in perspective, The Poetry of the American Civil War is the first comprehensive volume to focus entirely on poetry written and published during the Civil War. Of the nearly one thousand books of poetry published in the 1860s, some two hundred addressed the war in some way, and these collectively present a textured portrait of life during the conflict. The poets represented here hail from the North and the South, and at times mirror each other uncannily. Among them are housewives, doctors, preachers, bankers, journalists, and teachers. Their verse reflects the day-to-day reality of war, death, and destruction, and it contemplates questions of faith, slavery, society, patriotism, and politics. This is an essential volume for poetry lovers, historians, and Civil War enthusiasts alike.
In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people's tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll tell it myself. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid's narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.
HRC Honors International Transgender Day of Visibility
“Transgender and non-binary people face significant cultural, legal and economic challenges, but continue to bravely share their stories, boldly claim their seats at the table and tirelessly push equality forward. The transgender and non-binary community’s pride, power and resilience should be a lesson to us all. As advocates, we must commit to learning together and building a world where every person can truly thrive,” -HRC President Alphonso David.
Resources:
Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Resources
National Center for Transgender Equality
by Susan Stryker
Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s.
Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture, -Amazon
by Lori B. Girshick
In this extraordinary book, based on 150 in-depth interviews, Lori B. Girshick, a sociologist and social justice activist, brings together the voices of sex- and gender-diverse people who speak with absolute candor about their lives. Girshick presents transpeople speaking in their own voices about identity, coming out, passing, sexual orientation, relationship negotiations and the dynamics of attraction, homophobia (including internalized fears), and bullying. She exposes the guilt and the shame that "gender police" use in their attempts to exert control and points out the many ways transpeople are discriminated against in daily life, from filling out identification documents to gender-segregated bathrooms.
By showing us a variety of descriptions of diverse real lives and providing a thorough exploration of the embodied experiences of gender variant people, Girshick demonstrates that there is nothing inherently binary about gender, and that the way each of us experiences our own gender is, in fact, normal and natural. -Amazon
by Eric Yarbrough
Although societal awareness of transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) individuals is greater now than at any point in history, most professional mental health training programs provide little to no education regarding gender diversity.
Transgender Mental Health fills this gap. Forgoing clinical jargon in favor of accessible, straightforward language, this guide is designed to educate clinicians on how to address the basic needs of the TGNC community, and thus increase access to mental health care for TGNC individuals, which has been sorely lacking to this point.
Four sections address topics such as the history of the TGNC experience, mental health factors particular to the TGNC community, physical health including hormones of TGNC individuals, and gender-affirming surgical procedures, as well as nonsurgical interventions. Summarizing key points and review questions are included at the end of each chapter.
Relevant for a range of mental health professionals, Transgender Mental Health is a simple yet thorough primer on the complex topic of gender diversity. -Amazon
by Teresa J. Hornsby and Deryn Guest
A call for 'trans literacy' within biblical scholarship
In this volume Hornsby and Guest introduce readers to terms for the various identities of trans people and how the Bible can be an affirmation of those deemed sexually other by communities. This book offers readings of well known (e.g., Gen 1; Revelation) and not so well known (2 Sam 6; Jer 38) narratives to illustrate that the Bible has been translated and interpreted with a bias that makes heterosexuality and a two sex, two gender system natural, and thus divinely ordained. The authors present examples that show gender was never a binary, and in the Bible gender and sex are always dynamic categories that do, and must, transition.
Features:
by Kike Arnal
A richly evocative collection of photographs by internationally renowned photographer Kike Arnal, Bordered Lives seeks to push back against the transphobic caricatures that have perpetuated discrimination against the transgender community in Mexico. Despite some important advances in recognizing and protecting the rights of its transgender community, including legislating against hate crimes targeting transgender people, discrimination still persists, and the majority of the violent attacks against the LGBT community are against transgender women.
In the highly personal profiles that make up Bordered Lives, Arnal takes us into the lives of seven individuals in and around Mexico City. He shows them going about their day-to-day lives: getting ready in the morning, interacting with family and friends, and devoting their lives to helping others in the transgender community.
Deeply honest, sensitive, and humane, Bordered Lives challenges society's preconceived notions of sexuality, gender, and beauty not only in Mexico but across the globe. -Amazon
a film directed by Mark FreemanNathaniel Walters-Koh
They came for the hormones and stayed for the healthcare. These are the pioneering patients of the first free clinic in the country for trans folks, 1993 in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. More than a film about a clinic, the filmmakers had access to the unvarnished stories of 12 courageous individuals, who share their life experiences in the "Bad Old Days" decade by decade-- from the closeted 1950s, through the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s-- all illustrated by amazing (and fun) archival imagery. The second half of the film shows what a difference the groundbreaking Transgender Tuesdays clinic made in the lives of the country's most medically underserved, misunderstood, and despised minority.
by Laura Erickson-Schroth
There is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their gender identities. Only recently have sex and gender been thought of as separate concepts, and we have learned that sex (traditionally thought of as physical or biological) is as variable as gender (traditionally thought of as social).
While trans people share many common experiences, there is immense diversity within trans communities. There are an estimated 700,000 transgendered individuals in the US and 15 million worldwide. Even still, there's been a notable lack of organized information for this sizable group.
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource-a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender or genderqueer authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written for and by women, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is widely accessible to the transgender population, providing authoritative information in an inclusive and respectful way and representing the collective knowledge base of dozens of influential experts. Each chapter takes the reader through an important transgender issue, such as race, religion, employment, medical and surgical transition, mental health topics, relationships, sexuality, parenthood, arts and culture, and many more.
Anonymous quotes and testimonials from transgender people who have been surveyed about their experiences are woven throughout, adding compelling, personal voices to every page. In this unique way, hundreds of viewpoints from throughout the community have united to create this strong and pioneering book. It is a welcoming place for transgender and gender-questioning people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life. -Amazon
by Kirstin Cronn-Mills
"I didn't hear the word transgender until I was eighteen, when a person I was dating came out as trans. My boyfriend came out as my girlfriend, and I thought, 'What . . . is that?' She said, 'I just don't think I'm a man.' And I said, 'Guess what? Neither do I.' And then the skies parted, and I understood who I was."—Katie Burgess, nonprofit director and community activist/organizer
Meet Katie, Hayden, Dean, Brooke, David, Julia, and Natasha. Each is transgender, and in this book, they share their personal stories. Through their narratives, you'll get to know and love each person for their humor, intelligence, perseverance, and passion. You'll learn how they each came to better understand, accept, and express their gender identities, and you'll follow them through the sorrows and successes of their personal journeys.
Transgender Lives helps you understand what it means to be transgender in America while learning more about transgender history, the broad spectrum of transgender identities, and the transition process. You'll explore the challenges transgender Americans face, including discrimination, prejudice, bullying and violence, unequal access to medical care, and limited legal protections. For transgender readers, these stories offer support and encouragement. Transgender Lives is a space for trans* voices to be heard and to express the complexities of gender while focusing on what it means to be human. -Amazon
by Liz Jackson Hearns and Brian Kremer
The world of singing is heavily gendered, from choral part divisi by "men" and "women," to the Fach system of "male" and "female" voices, to casting roles based on gender, to choosing pronouns for pop, rock, and other genres. Because many of the current systems for singing education are so firmly anchored in gender binary systems, transgender and gender nonconforming singers are often forced into groups with which they feel they don't belong.
This resource equips teachers with a sympathetic perspective on these unique struggles and with the knowledge and resources needed to guide students to a healthy, joyful, and safe singing life. It helps the academic community understand the needs of transgender students through student narratives and suggestions for navigating academic procedures and policies.
The Singing Teacher's Guide to Transgender Voices is the first book of its kind to provide thorough, organized information on the training of trans singers for music educators in both the academic and independent teaching realms. -Amazon
by Sally Hines
This book is a major contribution to contemporary gender and sexuality studies. At a time when transgender practices are the subject of increasing social and cultural visibility, it marks the first UK study of transgender identity formation. It is also the first examination - anywhere in the world - of transgender practices of intimacy and care. The author addresses changing government legislation concerning the citizenship rights of transgender people. She examines the impact of legislative shifts upon transgender people's identities, intimate relationships and practices of care and considers the implications for future social policy. The book encompasses key approaches from the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, lesbian and gay studies, sociology and gender theory. Drawing on extensive interviews with transgender people, TransForming gender offers engaging, moving, and, at times, humorous accounts of the experiences of gender transition. Written in an accessible style, it provides a vivid insight into the diversity of living gender in today's world. The book will be essential reading for students and professionals in cultural studies, gender studies and sexuality studies as well as those in sociology, social policy, law, politics and philosophy. It will also be of interest to health and educational students, trainers and practitioners. Sally Hines is a lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Leeds. Her teaching and research interests fall within the areas of identity, gender, sexuality, the body and citizenship. -Amazon
by
This is both a personal book that offers an account of the author’s own trans* identity and a deeply engaged study of trans* collegians that reveals the complexities of trans* identities, and how these students navigate the trans* oppression present throughout society and their institutions, create community and resilience, and establish meaning and control in a world that assumes binary genders.
This book is addressed as much to trans* students themselves – offering them a frame to understand the genders that mark them as different and to address the feelings brought on by the weight of that difference – as it is to faculty, student affairs professionals, and college administrators, opening up the implications for the classroom and the wider campus.
This book not only remedies the paucity of literature on trans* college students, but does so from a perspective of resiliency and agency. Rather than situating trans* students as problems requiring accommodation, this book problematizes the college environment and frames trans* students as resilient individuals capable of participating in supportive communities and kinship networks, and of developing strategies to promote their own success.
Z Nicolazzo provides the reader with a nuanced and illuminating review of the literature on gender and sexuality that sheds light on the multiplicity of potential expressions and outward representations of trans* identity as a prelude to the ethnography ze conducted with nine trans* collegians that richly documents their interactions with, and responses to, environments ranging from the unwittingly offensive to explicitly antagonistic.
The book concludes by giving space to the study’s participants to themselves share what they want college faculty, staff, and students to know about their lived experiences. Two appendices respectively provide a glossary of vocabulary and terms to address commonly asked questions, and a description of the study design, offered as guide for others considering working alongside marginalized population in a manner that foregrounds ethics, care, and reciprocity. -Amazon
by Jackson Wright Schultz
Although transgender people are increasingly represented in academic studies and popular culture, they rarely have the opportunity to add their own voices to the conversation. In this remarkable book, Jackson Shultz records the stories of more than thirty Americans who identify as transgender. They range in age from fifteen to seventy-two; come from twenty-five different states and a wide array of racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds; and identify across a vast spectrum of genders and sexualities. Giving voice to a diverse group of individuals, the book raises questions about gender, acceptance, and unconditional love. From historical descriptions of activism to personal stories of discrimination, love, and community, these touching accounts of gender transition shed light on the uncharted territories that lie beyond the gender binary. Despite encounters with familial rejection, drug addiction, and medical malpractice, each account is imbued with optimism and humor, providing a thoughtful look at the daily joys and struggles of transgender life. With an introduction and explanations from the author, this work will appeal to transgender individuals, their significant others, friends, family, and allies; health-care providers, educators, and legal professionals; and anyone questioning their own gender, considering transition, or setting out on their own transition journey. -Amazon
by Sarah Boslaugh
Transgender individuals face unique challenges when it comes to their physical, psychological, and social health and well-being. This accessible reference investigates these concerns in depth, offering readers insights into topics such as discrimination and access to health care.
Although transgender individuals have always existed, their fight for acceptance and equal rights is just beginning. Within this larger context, one area of emerging concern is their health—physical, psychological, and social. From legislation determining public restroom access to insurance coverage of hormone therapy for transitioning individuals to harassment and discrimination, transgender people face a number of challenges that can negatively affect their well-being.
A part of Greenwood's Health and Medical Issues Today series, Part I of this book explores definitions of sex and gender, the history of transgender awareness and activism, physical and psychological health concerns specific to transgender individuals, and how identifying as transgender can have different effects on individuals' health at different stages in their life. Part II examines issues and controversies related to the health and well-being of transgender individuals. Part III provides a variety of useful materials, including case studies, a timeline of critical events, a glossary, and a directory of resources.
from the series Second Opinion produced by John McLean Media
While many media outlets sensationalize and politicize issues surrounding transgender youth, this program looks at the issue from a truly medical perspective. Along with medical experts who specialize in working with families, Jennifer and Josselynn Surridge describe what it is like to come to terms with being a transgender person, and with being a mother of a transgender child. This story will help every viewer understand the issue in a way that is rarely explored elsewhere.
Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book. #Not Your Princess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.
All the Women in My Family Sing is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity andbuild bridges to heal the brokenness in today's turbulent world.Sixty-nine authors -- African American, Asian American, Chicana, Native American, Cameroonian, South African, Korean, LGBTQI -- lend their voices to broaden cross-cultural understanding and to build bridges to each other's histories and daily experiences of life.America Ferrera's essay is from her powerful speech at the Women's March in Washington D.C.;Natalie Baszile writes about her travels to Louisiana to research Queen Sugar and finding the "painful truths" her father experienced in the "belly of segregation;"Porochista Khakpour tells us what it is like to fly across America under the Muslim travel ban;Lalita Tademy writes about her transition from top executive at Sun Microsystems to NY Times bestselling author.This anthology is monumental and timely as human rights and justice are being challenged around the world. It is a watershed title, not only written, but produced entirely by women of color, including the publishing, editing, process management, book cover design, and promotions. Our vision is to empower underrepresented voices and to impact the world of publishing in America -- particularly important in a time when 80% of people who work in publishing self-identify as white (as found recently in a study by Lee & Low Books, and reported on NPR).
Isra Shadi, a twenty-one-year-old woman of mixed Palestinian and white descent, lives in California with her paternal amu (uncle), amtu (aunt), and cousins after the death of her mother and abandonment by her father at a young age. Ever the outcast in her amu and amtu's household, they eagerly encourage Isra to marry and leave. After rejecting a string of undesirable suitors, she marries Yusef, an old love from her past. In Amreekiya, author Lena Mahmoud deftly juggles two storylines, alternating between Isra's youth and her current life as a married twentysomething who is torn between cultures and trying to define herself. The chapters chronicle various moments in Isra's narrative, including the volatile relationship of her parents and the trials and joys of forging a partnership with Yusef. Mahmoud also examines Isra's first visit to Palestine, the effects of sexism, how language affects identity, and what it means to have a love that overcomes unbearable pain. An exploration of womanhood from an underrepresented voice in American literature, Amreekiya is simultaneously unique and relatable. Featuring an authentic array of characters, Mahmoud's first novel is a much-needed story in a divided world.
Maya Angelou's unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters. Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies. I say, It's in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me. Thus begins "Phenomenal Woman," just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou's third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh--and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it. "It is true poetry she is writing," M.F.K. Fisher has observed, "not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity. . . . It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night . . . it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes."
This collection features more than two dozen narratives by atheists from different backgrounds across the United States. Ranging in age, race, sexual orientation, and religious upbringing, these individuals address deconversion, community building, parenting, and romantic relationships, providing a nuanced look at living without a god in a predominantly Christian nation. These narratives illuminate the complexities and consequences for nonbelievers in the United States. Stepping away from religious belief can have serious social and existential ramifications, forcing atheists to discover new ways to live meaningfully without a religious community. Yet shedding the constraints of a formal belief system can also be a freeing experience. Ultimately, this volume shows that claiming an atheist identity is anything but an act isolated from the other dimensions of the self. Upending common social, political, and psychological assumptions about atheists, this collection helps carve out a more accepted space for this minority within American society.
SANTIAGO GARCIA and DAVID RUBIN unite to bring forward the myth of Beowulf,which has endured for a thousand years, inspired an epic poem, become afoundational piece of English literature, and influenced generations of authors:from J.R.R. Tolkien and Seamus Heaney to a multitude of Hollywoodscreenwriters. BEOWULF tells of the tale of a Scandinavian hero in landsthat would become what is now Denmark and Sweden. A monster, Grendel, hasarrived in the kingdom of the Danes, devouring its men and women for over adecade until Beowulf arrives to save them. GARCIA and RUBIN faithfullyfollow the original story for a new version that is neither revisionist norpostmodern, but captures the tone and important details of the poem, translatingits potent, epic resonance and melancholy into a contemporary comic that isn'tstandard swords and sorcery or heroic fantasy fare, but rather an ancient storywith a modern perspective that remains respectful of the sourcematerial.
"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society". --- new 01.15.
Che on My Mind is an impressionistic look at the life, death, and legacy of Che Guevara by the renowned feminist poet and activist Margaret Randall. Recalling an era and this figure, she writes, "I am old enough to remember the world in which [Che] lived. I was part of that world, and it remains a part of me." Randall participated in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and eventually was forced to leave the country. She arrived in Cuba in 1969, less than two years after Che's death, and lived there until 1980. She became friends with several of Che's family members, friends, and compatriots. In Che on My Mind she reflects on his relationships with his family and fellow insurgents, including Fidel Castro. She is deeply admiring of Che's integrity and charisma and frank about what she sees as his strategic errors. Randall concludes by reflecting on the inspiration and lessons that Che's struggles might offer early twenty-first-century social justice activists and freedom fighters.
Dézafi is no ordinary zombie novel. In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frankétienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature to English-language readers for the first time. Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Dézafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner's daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the "dézafi" of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frankétienne's novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.
An American in Moscow channels Russian poetic traditions
"Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle." --George R.R. Martin The works in this anthology reflect both the myth and the truth about the part of the United States we call the "West." Is there one "true" West? Or have the changes that are overwhelming most of the rest of the country so modified the West that there is little commonality? The editors of Different Roads believe, with Stephen R. Covey, that our "strength lies in differences, not in similarities" and are constantly amazed by what Stanley Baldwin calls "the many-sidedness of truth." Many sides of the truth of the West are represented in the anthology. Is everything here absolutely the truth? The reader must decide. Topics included in this collection of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction range from the West's diversity of landscape, people, languages, attitudes and history to discussions of water issues, wildfires, antiquities and a broad range of environmental concerns. Different Roads is the third volume in Western Press Books' literary anthology series Manifest West. The press, affiliated with with Western State Colorado University, annually produces one anthology focused on Western regional writing. The 2014 theme is Western diversity and the title Different Roads comes from George R.R. Martin's quote above.
In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and ourgovernment. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.
A suicidal father looks to an older neighbor -- and the Cookie Monster -- for salvation and sanctuary as his life begins to unravel. A man seeking to save his estranged, drug-addicted brother from the city's underbelly confronts his own mortality. A chess match between a girl and her father turns into a master class about life, self-realization, and pride: "Now hold on little girl.... Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces." These are just a few glimpses into the world of the residents of the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, a largely black settlement founded in 1807 after the only successful slave revolt in the United States. Raw, edgy, and unrelenting yet infused with forgiveness, redemption, and humor, the stories in this collection explore characters suffering the quiet tragedies of everyday life and fighting for survival. In Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices -- choices of kindness or cruelty -- in the depths of darkness and hopelessness. Although Cross River's residents may be halted or deterred in their search for fulfillment, their spirits remain resilient -- always evolving and constantly moving.
Jew Boy is Alan Kaufman's riveting memoir of being raised by a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust. This pioneering masterpiece, the very first memoir of its kind by a member of the Second Generation is Kaufman's coming-of-age account, by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection. Throughout the course of his memoir, Kaufman touches on the pain, guilt, and confusion that shape the lives and characters of American-born children of Holocaust survivors. Kaufman struggles to comprehend what it means to be Jewish as he deals with the demons haunting his mother and attempts to escape his wretched home life by devoting himself to high school football. He eventually hitchhikes across the country, coming face-to-face with the phantoms he fled. Taking us from the streets of the Bronx to the highways of America, the kibbutzim and Israeli army to personal rebirth in San Francisco, and finally to a final reckoning in Germany, Jew Boy shines with the universal humanity of a brilliant writer embracing the gift of life. Kaufman's fierce passion will leave no reader untouched.
A girl afflicted with pyrokinesis tries to control her fire-starting long enough to go to a dance with a boy she likes. A woman trapped in a stalled marriage is excited by an alluring ex-con who enrolls in her YMCA cooking class. A teen accompanies her mother, a prestigious poet, to a writing conference where she navigates a misguided attraction to a married writer -- who is, in turn, attracted to her mother -- leaving her "inventing punishments for writers who believe in clichés as tired as broken hearts." In this affecting collection, Katie Cortese explores the many faces of love and desire. Featuring female narrators that range in age from five to forty, the narratives in Make Way for Her speak to the many challenges and often bittersweet rewards of offering, receiving, and returning love as imperfect human beings. The stories are united by the theme of desperate love, whether it's a daughter's love for a parent, a sister's for a sibling, or a romantic love that is sometimes returned and sometimes unrequited. Cortese's complex and multilayered stories play with the reader's own desires and anticipations as her characters stubbornly resist the expected. The intrepid girls and women in this book are, above all, explorers. They drive classic cars from Maine to Phoenix, board airplanes for the first time, and hike dense forests in search of adventure; but what they often find is that the most treacherous landscapes lie within. As a result, Make Way for Her explores a world of women who crave knowledge and experience, not simply sex or love.
milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
More and more Americans find themselves in some way touched by the opioid epidemic. But while many have observed the effects of the crisis, Not Far from Me: Stories of Opioids and Ohio is the first book on this public health emergency composed entirely of first-person accounts. The collection unfolds across fifty gripping accounts by Ohioans at the center of the national epidemic. Shared through personal stories, poetry, interviews, and photos, these perspectives transcend typical one-dimensional portrayals of the crisis to offer a mosaic of how politics, religion, sports, economics, culture, race, and sexual orientation intersect in and around the epidemic. Themes of pain and healing, despair and hope are woven throughout accounts of families who have lost loved ones to addiction, stories of survival, and experiences of working on the front lines in communities. In an attempt to give every voice the chance to be heard, Not Far from Me features contributors from across the state as they engage with the pain of opioid abuse and overdose, as well as the hope that personal- and community-level transformation brings. Ultimately, Not Far from Me humanizes the battle against addiction, challenges the stigma surrounding drug users, and unflinchingly faces the reality of the American opioid epidemic.
The most appealing quality of the novel is its haunting and unusual prose that really ought to be termed poetry. But this is poetry with an added touch as it is also a narrative that weaves together many lives engrossed in the daily struggle for survival. There are no heroes or villains, just ordinary folk trying to make the most of extraordinary circumstances.
Writers, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges,Alice Munro, Quim Monzo or Cristina Fernandez Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel,has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own.This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernandez Cubas, Paloma Diaz-Mas, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero,Maruja Torres, Soledad Puertolas and Maria Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marse. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women's writingin contemporary Spain. With the original texts in Spanish as well as facing-page English translations, an Introduction, notes, and bio-bibliographical information on each author, this volume is a useful tool for students of the Spanish language and culture at all levels. It includes a selection ofsecondary reading on Spanish women writers and a selection of anthologies of Spanish short stories since 1997.
"A collection of short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, personal narratives, critical essays and visual art produced by cisgender and transgender bisexual, pansexual, polysexual and fluid men from the United States, Canada, Chile, India, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom."-- Publisher's description.
The skillfully rendered dramatic monologues of Karen Kotrba�s SHE WHO IS LIKE A MARE document the Remarkable history of the Frontier Nursing Service in eastern Kentucky in the early twentieth century. Through the imagined voices of the founder, Mary Breckinridge, and the nurse-midwives she trained to travel the back roads of Kentucky on horseback, Kotrba brings a whole community to life. With a sure command of the multiple tones and mixed dictions of the region, she gives voice to a wide range of characters: the local citizens who are protective of their mountain women who have always �birthed the babies�; the physicians who want to replace any kind of midwifery with the new medical field of obstetrics; the fathers who ride out in fierce storms to bring help to their wives in labor; and the mothers, the children, and even one amazing poem in the voice of a horse. With this book, Karen Kotrba joins the company of our great documentary poets: Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, the Muriel Rukeyser of U.S. 1, and West Virginia poet Louise McNeill. She has brought to light a little known piece of women�s history�a story of cunning, courage, and caring�and has done so with unforgettable imagery, beautiful music, and love. This is a book I want to keep near me and reread, to remind myself of what is still possible in poetry and in our lives. --Maggie Anderson
A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy and love. She knows boredom and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday and the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol and violence. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the animal world and the ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.
Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) was born into an illustrious lineage of poets just as Japan's ancien régime was ceding authority to a new political order dominated by military power. Overcoming personal and political setbacks, Teika and his allies championed a new style of poetry that managed to innovate conceptually and linguistically within the narrow confines of the waka tradition and the limits of its thirty-one syllable form. Backed by powerful patrons, Teika emerged finally as the supreme arbiter of poetry in his time, serving as co-compiler of the eighth imperial anthology of waka, Shin Kokinshū (ca. 1210) and as solo compiler of the ninth. This first book-length study of Teika in English covers the most important and intriguing aspects of Teika's achievements and career, seeking the reasons behind Teika's fame and offering distinctive arguments about his oeuvre. A documentary biography sets the stage with valuable context about his fascinating life and times, followed by an exploration of his "Bodhidharma style," as Teika's critics pejoratively termed the new style of poetry. His beliefs about poetry are systematically elaborated through a thorough overview of his writing about waka. Teika's understanding of classical Chinese history, literature, and language is the focus of a separate chapter that examines the selective use of kana, the Japanese phonetic syllabary, in Teika's diary, which was written mainly in kanbun, a Japanese version of classical Chinese. The final chapter surveys the reception history of Teika's biography and literary works, from his own time into the modern period. Sometimes venerated as demigod of poetry, other times denigrated as an arrogant, inscrutable poet, Teika seldom inspired lukewarm reactions in his readers. Courtier, waka poet, compiler, copyist, editor, diarist, and critic, Teika is recognized today as one of the most influential poets in the history of Japanese literature. His oeuvre includes over four thousand waka poems, his diary, Meigetsuki, which he kept for over fifty years, and a fictional tale set in Tang-dynasty China. Over fifteen years in the making, Teika is essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese poetry, the history of Japan, and traditional Japanese culture.
To this day, Emily Dickinson remains a beloved and enigmatic figure in American poetry. This "lady in white," who shut herself away from the world and found solace alone with her words, has since her death been viewed primarily through the lens of her poetry, which afforded her beauty and hope amid the agony and loneliness of her life. As a reclusive writer himself, contemporary French author Christian Bobin felt a kindred tie to the poet, and his book The Lady in White honors Dickinson in the form of a brief, poetically imagined account of her life and the work that she gave the world. This fresh and personal interpretation of Dickinson's life leaves one with an impression of knowing Dickinson both through her poetry, as recalled by Bobin, and as he senses the person she was through her work and the sparse facts we have about her life.
Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she doesn't know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can't stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. "Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice." --Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation "An incredibly potent debut." --Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost "Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero." --Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street
"Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." -- The New Republic From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one's roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself. Divided into five chapters and illustrated by kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as i wept think of those flowers you plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt fall root rise in order to bloom
In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people's tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll tell it myself. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid's narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.
Deeply affecting and diverse in perspective, The Poetry of the American Civil War is the first comprehensive volume to focus entirely on poetry written and published during the Civil War. Of the nearly one thousand books of poetry published in the 1860s, some two hundred addressed the war in some way, and these collectively present a textured portrait of life during the conflict. The poets represented here hail from the North and the South, and at times mirror each other uncannily. Among them are housewives, doctors, preachers, bankers, journalists, and teachers. Their verse reflects the day-to-day reality of war, death, and destruction, and it contemplates questions of faith, slavery, society, patriotism, and politics. This is an essential volume for poetry lovers, historians, and Civil War enthusiasts alike.
"Every year March is designated Women’s History Month by Presidential proclamation. The month is set aside to honor women’s contributions in American history.
. . .
"The theme for Women's History Month in 2021 captures the spirit of these challenging times. Since many of the women's suffrage centennial celebrations originally scheduled for 2020 were curtailed, the National Women's History Alliance is extending the annual theme for 2021 to 'Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to Be Silenced'."
Women's History Month Resource Toolkit 2021
"The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history." Check out these resources here.
Want to quickly learn about some of the key players in Women's Suffrage and Equal Rights? Check out these short bios:
by Elisabeth Griffith
The first comprehensive, fully documented biography of the most important woman suffragist and feminist reformer in nineteenth-century America, In Her Own Right restores Elizabeth Cady Stanton to her true place in history. Griffith emphasizes the significance of role models and female friendships in Stanton's progress toward personal and political independence. In Her Own Right is, in the author's words, an "unabashedly 'great woman' biography."
edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith
More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands—along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony—as the major icon of the struggle for women’s suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton’s intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton’s thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women’s subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton’s numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton’s own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton’s views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition. -Amazon
The first installment in Ken Burns' remarkable documentary on the women's suffrage movement, this program depicts the early years of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. With the help of rarely seen archival materials and voice-over portrayals by well-known actors, viewers learn how the ideas of both women came to maturity and how they became allies in the struggle for women's rights.
The second installment in Ken Burns' eye-opening profile of the women's suffrage movement, this program depicts the later years of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. With the help of rarely seen archival materials and voice-over portrayals by well-known actors, viewers learn how the struggle for women's rights gained momentum in America and coalesced around the right to vote.
edited by Mary Margaret Huth and Christine L. Ridarsky
Though Susan B. Anthony is best remembered for leading the campaign for women's suffrage, she worked in multiple movements for equality beyond women's right to vote, including antislavery, Native American rights, temperance, and labor reform. In doing so she forged alliances with other activists to forward a broad social justice agenda, but she also faced opposition from these reformers on how best to achieve this goal.
Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights explores the diversity of women's activism in nineteenth-century American reform movements, focusing on how Anthony and other women reformers shaped those movements and our memories of them. The essays here chart the long career of Anthony in this rich historical context of women's activism and display the efforts of a wide variety of women, and the challenges they faced, in the continued struggle for equality.
by Margaret Washington
This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most magnetic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of the times in which she acted, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as a slave. Washington then highlights Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge, which propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.
by Larry G. Murphy
Sojourner Truth: A Biography traces this remarkable woman's life from her birth through adulthood and to her death in 1883. Drawing from public pronouncements, personal correspondence, and journalistic accounts of key historical actors, it follows her extraordinary career and sets the events of her life in the larger context of U.S. social and political history.
The years during which Truth lived bore witness to tremendous social and religious ferment in the United States, including, of course, the Civil War. Truth was directly involved, indeed an influential figure, in many contentious issues of the period, from slavery and abolition to religious revivalism, women's rights, temperance, racial reconciliation, and more. Her story serves as a prism through which readers will better understand how these complex matters were adjudicated in 19th-century America. More than that, her life demonstrates what courage, character, and principle can accomplish against all odds.
by Pauline Meyers
On this episode of Camera Three, Pauline Myers portrays Sojourner Truth in a one-woman show incorporating famous addresses and quotations. A former slave, Truth joined the abolitionist movement and fought for civil and women's rights.
by Sarah L. Silkey
During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to racially motivated American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a "black lady reformer"--A role American society denied her - and to assert her right to defend her race from abroad. This book explores Wells's 1893-94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society. Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates of lynching in both Britain and the United States. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with voters choose weather to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells's campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.
a film by William Greaves
Documents the dramatic life and turbulent times of the pioneering African American journalist, activist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader of the post-Reconstruction period. Though virtually forgotten today, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a household name in Black America during much of her lifetime (1863-1931) and was considered the equal of her well-known African American contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. . . Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison reads selections from Wells' memoirs and other writings in this winner of more than 20 film festival awards. "One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap." - Ida B. Wells
"Tells of the brave life and works of the 19th century journalist, known among Black reporters as 'the princess of the press, ' who led the nation's first anti-lynching campaign." - New York Times
"A powerful account of the life of one of the earliest heroes in the Civil Rights Movement. . . The historical record of her achievements remains relatively modest. This documentary goes a long way towards rectifying that egregious oversight." - Chicago Sun-Times
"A keenly realized profile of Ida B. Wells, an African American who used her potent skills as writer and orator to fight racism and sexism." - Los Angeles Times.
by Linda McMurry Edwards
In the generation that followed Frederick Douglass, no African American was more prominent, or more outspoken, than Ida B. Wells. Her crusade against lynching in the 1890s made her famous, or notorious, across America, and she was seriously considered as a rival to W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington for race leadership. This book is the first full biography of Wells, a passionate crusader for black people and women--and one who was sometimes torn by her conflicting loyalties to race and gender.
Wells' career began amidst controversy when she sued a Tennessee railroad company for ousting her from a first class car, a legal battle which launched her lifelong commitment to journalism and activism. In the 1890s, Wells focused her eloquence on the horrors of lynching, exposing it as a widespread form of racial terrorism. Backing strong words with strong actions, she lectured in the States and abroad, arranged legal representation for black prisoners, hired investigators, founded anti-lynching leagues, sought recourse from Congress, and more. Wells was an equally forceful advocate for women's rights, but parted ways with feminist allies who would subordinate racial justice to their cause. She perpetually walked a tightrope between being an agitator and behaving like a "lady"--a designation prized by black women too often denigrated and exploited by white men. Using diary entries, letters, and published writings, McMurry illuminates Wells's fiery personality, and the uncompromising approach that sometimes lost her friendships even as it won great victories.
To Keep the Waters Troubled is an unforgettable account of a remarkable woman and the and the times she helped to change. -Amazon
by Maegan Parker Brooks
A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression. A Voice That Could Stir an Army is a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols―images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing―to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change.
Drawing upon dozens of newly recovered Hamer texts and recent interviews with Hamer's friends, family, and fellow activists, Maegan Parker Brooks moves chronologically through Hamer's life. Brooks recounts Hamer's early influences, her intersection with the black freedom movement, and her rise to prominence at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Brooks also considers Hamer's lesser-known contributions to the fight against poverty and to feminist politics before analyzing how Hamer is remembered posthumously. The book concludes by emphasizing what remains rhetorical about Hamer's biography, using the 2012 statue and museum dedication in Hamer's hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi, to examine the larger social, political, and historiographical implications of her legacy. -Amazon
by Fannie Lou Hamer
edited by Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck
Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans.
by
This biography of Alice Paul, long an elusive figure in the political history of American women, offers the first in-depth examination of the sources of Paul's ambition and the development of her political consciousness. Focusing on Paul's early years and suffrage leadership, the authors bring fresh insights to the persistent questions about Alice Paul and her legacy.
by Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene
Past biographies, histories, and government documents have ignored Alice Paul's contribution to the women's suffrage movement, but this groundbreaking study scrupulously fills the gap in the historical record. Masterfully framed by an analysis of Paul's nonviolent and visual rhetorical strategies, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign narrates the remarkable story of the first person to picket the White House, the first to attempt a national political boycott, the first to burn the president in effigy, and the first to lead a successful campaign of nonviolence.
Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene also chronicle other dramatic techniques that Paul deftly used to gain publicity for the suffrage movement. Stunningly woven into the narrative are accounts of many instances in which women were in physical danger. Rather than avoid discussion of Paul's imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding, the authors divulge the strategies she employed in her campaign. Paul's controversial approach, the authors assert, was essential in changing American attitudes toward suffrage. -Amazon
by Amy E. Butler
A comprehensive look at the ERA debates of the 1920s. -Amazon
by Trisha Franzen
Acknowledged by her contemporaries as the most outstanding woman suffrage orator of her time, Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) has nonetheless received minimal attention from historians. Trisha Franzen rectifies that oversight with this first scholarly biography of Shaw, a study that illuminates Shaw's oft-ignored early years and challenges existing scholarship on her time in the suffrage movement. An immigrant from a poor family, Shaw grew up in an economic reality that encouraged the adoption of non-traditional gender roles. Challenging traditional gender boundaries throughout her life, she put herself through college, worked as an ordained minister and a doctor, and built a tightly-knit family with her secretary and longtime companion Lucy E. Anthony. Drawing on unprecedented research, Franzen shows how these circumstances and choices both impacted Shaw's role in the woman suffrage movement and set her apart from her native-born, middle- and upper-class colleagues. Franzen also rehabilitates Shaw's years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, arguing that Shaw's much-belittled tenure actually marked a renaissance of both NAWSA and the suffrage movement as a whole. Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage presents a clear and compelling portrait of a woman whose significance has too long been misinterpreted and misunderstood.
produced by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions
In the 1960s, labor leader and civil rights activist, Dolores Huerta organized in the fields, spearheading a national boycott of grapes and lettuce and making decent pay and working conditions a reality for thousands of farm workers. After receiving a Medal of Freedom at the White House in May 2012, Huerta spoke with NewsHour's Ray Suarez.
by Louise W. Knight
Jane Addams was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This biography, covering the first half of Addams's life, reveals in detail her development as a political activist and social philosopher--we observe the powerful mind of a woman encountering the radical ideas of her age. Addams, a child of a wealthy family, longed for a life of larger purpose. After receiving an inheritance, she moved to Chicago in 1889 to co-found Hull House, the city's first settlement house--a neighborhood center for education and social gatherings. As Addams learned of the abject working conditions in American factories, the unchecked power wielded by employers, the impact of corrupt local politics on city services, and the intolerable limits placed on women by their lack of voting rights, she was transformed: she came to understand that the national ideal of democracy was also a mandate for civic activism.
edited by
Using a rich array of newly available sources and contemporary methodologies from many disciplines, the ten original essays in this volume give a fresh appraisal of Addams as a theorist and practitioner of democracy. In an increasingly interdependent world, Addams's life work offers resources for activists, scholars, policy makers, and theorists alike. This volume demonstrates how scholars continue to interpret Addams as a model for transcending disciplinary boundaries, generating theory out of concrete experience, and keeping theory and practice in close and fruitful dialogue. Contributors are Harriet Hyman Alonso, Victoria Bissell Brown, Wendy Chmielewski, Marilyn Fischer, Shannon Jackson, Louise W. Knight, Carol Nackenoff, Karen Pastorello, Wendy Sarvasay, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Camilla Stivers.
by Sharon M. Harris
Perhaps more telling about her life are the words of an 1866 London Anglo-American Times reporter, "Her strange adventures, thrilling experiences, important services and marvelous achievements exceed anything that modern romance or fiction has produced. . . . She has been one of the greatest benefactors of her sex and of the human race."
In this biography Sharon M. Harris steers away from a simplistic view and showcases Walker as a Medal of Honor recipient, examining her work as an activist, author, and Civil War surgeon, along with the many nineteenth-century issues she championed: political, social, medical, and legal reforms, abolition, temperance, gender equality, U.S. imperialism, and the New Woman.
Rich in research and keyed to a new generation, Dr. Mary Walker captures its subject's articulate political voice, public self, and the realities of an individual whose ardent beliefs in justice helped shape the radical politics of her time.
by Mary E. Walker, M.D.
The only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for her service during the Civil War, Dr. Mary E. Walker (1832-1919) was a surgeon, a public lecturer, and an outspoken champion of women's rights. One of the first women in the country to be awarded a medical degree, she served as an assistant surgeon for the 52nd Ohio Infantry and was cited for valor in going behind enemy lines to attend to the sick.Though her early career was highly distinguished, her subsequent life became controversial and in some respects tragic. Always a woman of great independence, she publicly expressed strong opinions about the need for women's rights and harshly criticized prevailing patriarchal attitudes and the enforced subservience of women. After the war she published Hit, an enigmatically titled book in which she advanced her radical ideas on topics from love and marriage and dress reform to woman's suffrage and religion.With an insightful foreword by Walker specialist Mercedes Graf (professor of psychology, Governors State University, University Park, Illinois), this new edition of a little known work by a pioneering feminist will be of great interest to anyone concerned about women's rights. -Amazon
by Katherine Mellen Charron
In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this biography of Clark, Charron demonstrates Clark's crucial role--and the role of many black women teachers--in making education a cornerstone of the twentieth-century freedom struggle.
by Sally G. McMillen
In the rotunda of the nation's Capital a statue pays homage to three famous nineteenth-century American women suffragists: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott. "Historically," the inscription beneath the marble statue notes, "these three stand unique and peerless." In fact, the statue has a glaring omission: Lucy Stone. A pivotal leader in the fight for both abolition and gender equality, her achievements marked the beginning of the women's rights movement and helped to lay the groundwork for the eventual winning of women's suffrage. Yet, today most Americans have never heard of Lucy Stone. Sally McMillen sets out to address this significant historical oversight in this engaging biography. Exploring her extraordinary life and the role she played in crafting a more just society, McMillen restores Lucy Stone to her rightful place at the center of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. Raised in a middle-class Massachusetts farm family, Stone became convinced at an early age that education was key to women's independence and selfhood, and went on to attend the Oberlin Collegiate Institute. When she graduated in 1847 as one of the first women in the US to earn a college degree, she was drawn into the public sector as an activist and quickly became one of the most famous orators of her day. Lecturing on anti-slavery and women's rights, she was instrumental in organizing and speaking at several annual national woman's rights conventions throughout the 1850s. She played a critical role in the organization and leadership of the American Equal Rights Association during the Civil War, and, in 1869, cofounded the American Woman Suffrage Association, one of two national women's rights organizations that fought for women's right to vote. Encompassing Stone's marriage to Henry Blackwell and the birth of their daughter Alice, as well as her significant friendships with Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and others, McMillen's biography paints a complete picture of Stone's influential and eminently important life and work. Self-effacing until the end of her life, Stone did not relish the limelight the way Elizabeth Cady Stanton did, nor did she gain the many followers whom Susan B. Anthony attracted through her extensive travels and years of dedicated work. Yet her contributions to the woman's rights movement were no less significant or revolutionary than those of her more widely lauded peers. In this accessible, readable, and historically-grounded work, Lucy Stone is finally given the standing she deserves.
by Victoria C. Woodhull
edited by Cari M. Carpenter
Suffragist, lecturer, eugenicist businesswoman, free lover, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Victoria C. Woodhull (1838-1927) has been all but forgotten as a leading nineteenth-century feminist writer and radical. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull is the first multigenre, multisubject collection of her materials, giving contemporary audiences a glimpse into the radical views of this nineteenth-century woman who advocated free love between consensual adults and who was labeled "Mrs. Satan" by cartoonist Thomas Nast. Woodhull's texts reveal the multiple conflicting aspects of this influential woman, who has been portrayed in the past as either a disreputable figure or a brave pioneer. This collection of letters, speeches, essays, and articles elucidate some of the lesser-known movements and ideas of the nineteenth century. It also highlights, through Woodhull's correspondence with fellow suffragist Lucretia Mott, tensions within the suffragist movement and demonstrates the changing political atmosphere and role of women in business and politics in the late nineteenth century. With a comprehensive introduction contextualizing Woodhull's most important writing, this collection provides a clear lens through which to view late nineteenth-century suffragism, labor reform, reproductive rights, sexual politics, and spiritualism.
by Kim E. Nielsen
Several decades after her death in 1968, Helen Keller remains one of the most widely recognized women of the twentieth century. But the fascinating story of her vivid political life—particularly her interest in radicalism and anti-capitalist activism—has been largely overwhelmed by the sentimentalized story of her as a young deaf-blind girl.
Keller had many lives indeed. Best known for her advocacy on behalf of the blind, she was also a member of the socialist party, an advocate of women's suffrage, a defender of the radical International Workers of the World, and a supporter of birth control—and she served as one of the nation's most effective but unofficial international ambassadors. In spite of all her political work, though, Keller rarely explored the political dimensions of disability, adopting beliefs that were often seen as conservative, patronizing, and occasionally repugnant. Under the wing of Alexander Graham Bell, a controversial figure in the deaf community who promoted lip-reading over sign language, Keller became a proponent of oralism, thereby alienating herself from others in the deaf community who believed that a rich deaf culture was possible through sign language. But only by distancing herself from the deaf community was she able to maintain a public image as a one-of-a-kind miracle.
Using analytic tools and new sources, Kim E. Nielsen's political biography of Helen Keller has many lives, teasing out the motivations for and implications of her political and personal revolutions to reveal a more complex and intriguing woman than the Helen Keller we thought we knew. -Amazon
by Carol Faulkner
Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs, and her fellow Quakers.
by Lucretia Mott
edited by Christopher Densmore, Carol Faulkner, Nancy Hewitt, and Beverly Wilson Palmer
Committed abolitionist, controversial Quaker minister, tireless pacifist, fiery crusader for women's rights--Lucretia Mott was one of the great reformers in America history. Her sixty years of sermons and speeches reached untold thousands of people. Yet Mott eschewed prepared lectures in favor of an extemporaneous speaking style inspired by the inner light at the core of her Quaker faith. It was left to stenographers, journalists, Friends, and colleagues to record her words for posterity. Drawing on widely scattered archives, newspaper accounts, and other sources, Lucretia Mott Speaks unearths the essential speeches and remarks from Mott's remarkable career. The editors have chosen selections representing important themes and events in her public life. Extensive annotations provide vibrant context and show Mott's engagement with allies and opponents. The speeches illuminate her passionate belief that her many causes were all intertwined. The result is an authoritative resource, one that enriches our understanding of Mott's views, rhetorical strategies, and still-powerful influence on American society.
edited by their granddaughter, Anna Davis Hallowell; with portraits
The life and times of two leading 19th century reformers emerge through their letters and diaries.
by Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women's suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women's suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women's rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women's rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others. -Amazon
by Joan Quigley
In Just Another Southern Town, Joan Quigley recounts an untold chapter of the civil rights movement: an epic battle to topple segregation in Washington, the symbolic home of American democracy. At the book's heart is the formidable Mary Church Terrell and the test case she mounts seeking to enforce Reconstruction-era laws prohibiting segregation in D.C. restaurants. Through the prism of Terrell's story, Quigley reassesses Washington's relationship to civil rights history, bringing to life a pivotal fight for equality that erupted five years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus and a decade before the student sit-in movement rocked segregated lunch counters across the South. -Amazon
Check out the actual words of these fiery women as they fought for their equal rights to representation:
Mother Goose as a Suffragette by the Women Suffrage Party of New York City
Lecture on the Rights and Wrongs of Woman: delivered in Oswego, NY, August 5, 1854 by Susan B. Anthony
Speech of Sojourner Truth to the Mob Convention, New York, September, 1853 by Sojourner Truth
The Seneca Falls declaration (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"The Women's Suffrage Bill" by Nashville Globe, 25 October 1918, p. 4
The article covers the defeat of the Susan B. Anthony Federal Amendment Bill in the U.S. Senate due to a provision prohibiting Negro women from voting.
Includes portraits of the Board of Officers from 1888-1891.
Manual of Woman Suffrage Principles by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, 1901
"Elizabeth Cady Stanton" by Ida Husted Harper, The American Monthly Review of Reviews: an International Magazine, v. XXVI
A eulogistic article in praise of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's contributions to the Women's Suffrage Movement by a fellow suffragist.
Why Women Should Vote by Jane Addams
Women's Suffrage in New Jersey: an Address by Lucy Stone
"Woman's Suffrage: A Potent Agency in Public Reforms" by Mary E. Britton, American Catholic Tribune, July 23, 1887, p. 1
Woman's Suffrage Tracts, no. 2: Equal Rights for Women: a speech by George William Curtis in the Constitutional Convention of New York, at Albany, July 19, 1867
Includes the Constitution of the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association.
Women's Suffrage, 1915 United States
A map displaying women's suffrage by state in 1915.
by Ellen Carol DuBois
In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century. For this new edition, Ellen Carol DuBois addresses the changing context for the history of woman suffrage at the millennium.
by Susan E. Marshall
When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, giving women the right to vote, one group of women expressed bitter disappointment and vowed to fight against “this feminist disease.” Why this fierce and extended opposition? In Splintered Sisterhood, Susan Marshall argues that the women of the anti-suffrage movement mobilized not as threatened homemakers but as influential political strategists.
Drawing on surviving records of major anti-suffrage organizations, Marshall makes clear that anti-suffrage women organized to protect gendered class interests. She shows that many of the most vocal anti-suffragists were wealthy, educated women who exercised considerable political influence through their personal ties to men in politics as well as by their own positions as leaders of social service committees. Under the guise of defending an ideal of “true womanhood,” these powerful women sought to keep the vote from lower-class women, fearing it would result in an increase in the “ignorant vote” and in their own displacement from positions of influence. This book reveals the increasingly militant style of anti-suffrage protest as the conflict over female voting rights escalated. Splintered Sisterhood adds a missing piece to the history of women’s rights activism in the United States and illuminates current issues of anti-feminism. -Amazon
by Judith Wellman
Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women's rights movement in the United States and beyond. In The Road To Seneca Falls, Judith Wellman offers the first well documented, full-length account of this historic meeting in its contemporary context.
The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is this convergence, she argues, that foments one of the greatest rebellions of modern times.
Rather than working heavy-handedly downward from their official "Declaration of Sentiments," Wellman works upward from richly detailed documentary evidence to construct a complex tapestry of causes that lay behind the convention, bringing the struggle to life. Her approach results in a satisfying combination of social, community, and reform history with individual and collective biographical elements.
The Road to Seneca Falls challenges all of us to reflect on what it means to be an American trying to implement the belief that "all men and women are created equal," both then and now. A fascinating story in its own right, it is also a seminal piece of scholarship for anyone interested in history, politics, or gender.
by Faye E. Dudden
The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.
by Annelise Orleck
Over twenty years after its initial publication, Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire continues to resonate with its harrowing story of activism, labor, and women's history. Orleck traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely made more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit tenements where young workers studied together. Orleck paints a compelling picture of housewives' food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage. Featuring a new preface by the author, this new edition reasserts itself as a pivotal text in twentieth-century labor history.
edited by Carrie Fredericks
Presents the Nineteenth Amendment in a historical context, examining how it has been tested in the courts and present current controversies and debates. Focuses on women's voting rights.
edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition - some well known, some forgotten over generations - who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections - from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches - span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman's story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women's agency.
by Laura E. Free
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, identified all legitimate voters as 'male.' In so doing, it added gender-specific language to the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Suffrage Reconstructed is the first book to consider how and why the amendment's authors made this decision. Vividly detailing congressional floor bickering and activist campaigning, Laura E. Free takes readers into the pre- and postwar fights over precisely who should have the right to vote. Free demonstrates that all men, black and white, were the ultimate victors of these fights, as gender became the single most important marker of voting rights during Reconstruction. Free argues that the Fourteenth Amendment's language was shaped by three key groups: African American activists who used ideas about manhood to claim black men's right to the ballot, postwar congressmen who sought to justify enfranchising southern black men, and women's rights advocates who began to petition Congress for the ballot for the first time as the Amendment was being drafted. To prevent women's inadvertent enfranchisement, and to incorporate formerly disfranchised black men into the voting polity, the Fourteenth Amendment's congressional authors turned to gender to define the new American voter. Faced with this exclusion some woman suffragists, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, turned to rhetorical racism in order to mount a campaign against sex as a determinant of one's capacity to vote. Stanton's actions caused a rift with Frederick Douglass and a schism in the fledgling woman suffrage movement. By integrating gender analysis and political history, Suffrage Reconstructed offers a new interpretation of the Civil War-era remaking of American democracy, placing African American activists and women's rights advocates at the heart of nineteenth-century American conversations about public policy, civil rights, and the franchise.
produced by Educational Video Group
This video documentary re-creates the speeches of leading suffragettes whose impassioned words shaped the women’s movement during its inception in the late 19th century.
edited by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills
Includes writings by:
• Sojourner Truth
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Frederick Douglass
• Fanny Fern
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Djuna Barnes
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Marianne Moore
• Sui Sin Far
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Gertrude Stein
and many others. -Amazon
by
This book departs from familiar accounts of high-profile woman suffrage activists whose main concern was a federal constitutional amendment. It tells the story of woman suffrage as one involving the diverse politics of women across the country as well as the incentives of the men with the primary political authority to grant new voting rights – those in state legislatures. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, the book explains the success and failures of efforts for woman suffrage provisions in five states and in the U.S. Congress as the result of successful and failed coalitional politics between the suffrage movement and important constituencies of existing male voters, including farmers' organizations, labor unions, and the Populist and Progressive parties.
by
Experience the American feminism in its core. Learn about the decades long fight, about the endurance and the strength needed to continue the battle against persistent indifference and injustice. Go back in time and get to know the founders and the followers, the characters of all the strong women involved in the movement. Find out what was the spark which started it all and kept the flame going. Learn about the organization, witness the backdoor conversations and discussions, read their personal correspondence, speeches and planned tactics. Learn about the relationship between great activists and what caused the fraction. See the movement in its full light and learn what it took to obtain most basic civil rights. Know your history!
This six volumes edition covers the women's suffrage movement from 1848 to 1922. Originally envisioned as a modest publication that would take only four months to write, it evolved into a work of more than 5700 pages written over a period of 41 years and was completed in 1922, long after the deaths of its visionary authors and editors, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. However, realizing that the project was unlikely to make a profit, Anthony had already bought the rights from the other authors. As a sole owner, she published the books herself and donated many copies to libraries and people of influence.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was an American suffragist, social reformer and women's rights activist.
Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940) was a suffragist and daughter of Elizabeth Stanton.
Matilda Gage (1826–1898) was a suffragist, a Native American rights activist and an abolitionist.
Ida H. Harper (1851–1931) was a prominent figure in the United States women's suffrage movement. She was an American author, journalist and biographer of Susan B. Anthony. -Amazon
To explore the regional movements and state struggles that led to the Nineteenth Amendment, check out these books.
For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 by Lisa G. Materson
How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 by Rebecca Mead
Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello
No Votes for Women: the New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement by Susan Goodier
New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler
The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s by Lorraine Gates Schuyler
Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 by Maureen A. Flanagan
by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
"Rarely has a short book accomplished so much as Terborg-Penn's seminal work. With the utmost attention to detail Terborg-Penn examines the contributions of black suffragist stalwarts . . . It undoubtedly will become the definitive work on African American women's involvement in the mainstream woman suffrage movement and specifically on black women's struggle for the vote." ―Choice
" . . . this is a well-written overview of a crucial aspect of African American history that would be ideal for the college classroom." ―Journal of American History
" . . . not only a major contribution to suffrage history . . . but also a powerful indictment of white suffrage activists who were able to see beyond the sexism but not the racism of their society." ―Journal of Southern History
"This groundbreaking volume provides a theoretical and practical framework for new paradigms in African American women's history. . . . All Black politicians should read and discuss this unique and brilliant book. Many lessons can be learned." ―Philadelphia New Observer
This comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote analyzes the women's own stories and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement. Terborg-Penn shows how every political and racial effort to keep African American women disfranchised met with their active resistance until black women finally achieved full citizenship. -Amazon
a film produced by American Public Television
In July of 1920, all eyes were on Nashville, Tennessee as anti- and pro-suffragists fought for their vision of a socially evolving United States. This program chronicles the dramatic vote to ratify the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote, and the years of debate about women's suffrage that preceded it. On July 17, 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, arrived to spend a few days in Nashville. She was traveling on the heels of Tennessee Governor A.H. Roberts' announcement of a special session of the state legislature, called at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Catt's few days dragged into weeks at her headquarters in the Hermitage Hotel, where pro- and anti- suffragists continued to clash in what came to be known as the "War of the Roses." On August 18, 1920, the House convened. After two consecutive 48-48 outcomes to table the resolution, it was put to a vote. At the last minute, 24-year-old freshman representative Harry Burn recalled a letter from his mother received that morning, urging him to, "be a good boy" and grant women the right to vote. In spite of wearing a red rose, Burn swung his vote, making Tennessee the deciding 36th state to enable passage of the 19th Amendment.
by Melanie Gustafson
An examination of women's long history of participating in partisan politics, Women and the Republican Party, 1854-1924 explores the forces that propelled women to partisan activism in an era of widespread disfranchisement and provides a new perspective on how women fashioned their political strategies and identities before and after 1920. Melanie Susan Gustafson examines women's partisan history as part of the larger history of women's political culture. Contesting the accepted notion that women were uninvolved in political parties before they formally got the vote, Gustafson reveals the length and depth of women's partisan activism between the founding of the Republican party, whose abolitionist agenda captured the loyalty of many women, and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
by Joyce Duncan
The three waves of feminism are explored through the lives of the women who made history in bringing women's issues to the forefront of American society. Many early feminists supported not only women's rights, but also rights of slaves and contributed to the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, granting emancipation to slaves. They continued to work towards women's suffrage and were hopeful the Fourteenth Amendment would provide universal suffrage. However, women were not granted suffrage until the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, nearly fifty years later. It was women's fundamental need for independence and an identity of their own, separate from that of men, which thrust the women's movement forward and continues to propel it today. Many notable women, such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Billie Jean King, Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown, Jane Fonda, and Sandra Day O'Connor, are included in this history of the women's movement in America. The biographical entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a bibliography. The Shapers of the Great Debate series takes a biographical approach to history, following the premise that people make history in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Each volume in this series examines the lives and experiences of the individuals involved in a particular debate through both major and minor biographies.
"The black family has been a topic of study in many disciplines—history, literature, the visual arts and film studies, sociology, anthropology, and social policy. Its representation, identity, and diversity have been reverenced, stereotyped, and vilified from the days of slavery to our own time. The black family knows no single location, since family reunions and genetic-ancestry searches testify to the spread of family members across states, nations, and continents. Not only are individual black families diasporic, but Africa and the diaspora itself have been long portrayed as the black family at large. While the role of the black family has been described by some as a microcosm of the entire race, its complexity as the “foundation” of African American life and history can be seen in numerous debates over how to represent its meaning and typicality from a historical perspective—as slave or free, as patriarchal or matriarchal/matrifocal, as single-headed or dual-headed household, as extended or nuclear, as fictive kin or blood lineage, as legal or common law, and as black or interracial, etc. Variation appears, as well, in discussions on the nature and impact of parenting, childhood, marriage, gender norms, sexuality, and incarceration. The family offers a rich tapestry of images for exploring the African American past and present. -Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
by Carla L. Peterson
Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City.
Black Gotham challenges many of the accepted "truths" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase "nineteenth-century black Americans" means enslaved people, that "New York state before the Civil War" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow.
Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, Black Gotham is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture. -Amazon
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From 1900 until the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland-Buxton, Iowa. Originally established by the Consolidation Coal Company, Buxton was the largest unincorporated coal mining community in Iowa. What made Buxton unique, however, is the fact that the majority of its 5,000 residents were African Americans—a highly unusual racial composition for a state which was over 90 percent white. At a time when both southern and northern blacks were disadvantaged and oppressed, blacks in Buxton enjoyed true racial integration—steady employment, above-average wages, decent housing, and minimal discrimination. For such reasons, Buxton was commonly known as “the black man's utopia in Iowa.”
Containing documentary evidence—including newspapers, census records, photographs, and state mining reports—along with interviews of 75 former residents, Buxton: Work and Racial Equality in a Coal Mining Community (originally published in 1987 and winner of the 1988 Benjamin Shambaugh Award) explored the Buxton experience from a variety of perspectives. The authors—an American historian, a family sociologist, and a race relations sociologist—provided a truly interdisciplinary history of one Iowa's most unique communities. -Amazon
by Chuck V. Willie and Richard J. Reddick
Charles Willie and Richard Reddick's A New Look at Black Families has introduced thousands of students to the intricacies of the Black family in American society. Using a case study approach, Willie and Reddick show the varieties of the Black family experience and how those experiences vary by socioeconomic status. The sixth edition has been re-organized and updated throughout. The new Part III: Cases Against and for Black Men and Women unites two chapters from previous editions into a cohesive discussion of stereotypes and misunderstandings from both scholars and the mass media.
by Sonnie W. Hereford and Jack D. Ellis
Beside the Troubled Waters is a memoir by an African American physician in Alabama whose story in many ways typifies the lives and careers of black doctors in the south during the segregationist era while also illustrating the diversity of the black experience in the medical profession. Based on interviews conducted with Hereford over ten years, the account includes his childhood and youth as the son of a black sharecropper and Primitive Baptist minister in Madison County, Alabama, during the Depression; his education at Huntsville's all-black Councill School and medical training at Meha.
by Elisabeth Petry
Ann Petry (1908-1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels, along with various short stories and non-fiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities. Petry's ancestors, the James family, served as inspiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by Petry's daughter, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century.
by Kathryn L. Morgan
Collecting her family's own stories and photographs, the author has brought to life the attempts of five generations of black women to cope with the fears, angers, and anxieties of life in a hostile white society. -Amazon
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by Heather Andrea Williams
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant 'information wanted' advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.
by Anthony Reddie
Working through oral traditions, this book illustrates the importance of spirituality and the family in African-Caribbean culture. The author shows how inter-generational conversations, where elders share personal experiences and reflections from their life with children and young people, encourage, inspire and educate the younger generation and contribute to their sense of identity. The author's approach can be applied in different cultural settings and both outlines and affirms an active role for older people in the community. It also provides useful historical background on the migration of people coming from the Caribbean to Britain. Containing case studies, it is a practical and reflective resource for religious professionals, social workers and anyone seeking to understand the meaning of religion and faith for Britain's African and Caribbean communities.
by Miriama Lockington
I am a girl but most days I feel like a question mark. Makeda June Kirkland is eleven years old, adopted, and black. Her parents and big sister are white, and even though she loves her family very much, Keda often feels left out. When Keda's family moves from Maryland to New Mexico, she leaves behind her best friend, Lena - the only other adopted black girl she knows - for a new life. In New Mexico, everything is different. At home, Keda's sister is too cool to hang out with her anymore, and at school, she can't seem to find one true friend. Through it all, Keda can't help wondering: What would it feel like to grow up with a family that looks like me? In this deeply felt coming-of-age story about family, sisterhood, music, race, and identity, Mariama J. Lockington draws on some of the emotional truths from her own experiences growing up with an adoptive white family. For Black Girls Like Me is for anyone who has ever asked themselves: How do you figure out where you are going if you don't know where you came from?
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by Rhonda M. Roorda
While many proponents of transracial adoption claim that American society is increasingly becoming colour-blind, a growing body of research reveals that for transracial adoptees of all backgrounds, racial identity does matter. Rhonda M. Roorda elaborates significantly on that finding, specifically studying the effects of the adoption of black and biracial children by white parents. She incorporates diverse perspectives on transracial adoption by concerned black Americans of various ages, including those who lived through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era. All her interviewees have been involved either personally or professionally in the lives of transracial adoptees, and they offer strategies for navigating systemic racial inequalities while affirming the importance of black communities in the lives of transracial adoptive families.
by Otis Trotter
After saying our good-byes to friends and neighbors, we all got in the cars and headed up the hill and down the road toward a future in Ohio that we hoped would be brighter, ' Otis Trotter writes in Keeping Heart : A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine. Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Trotter and his thirteen siblings, the story begins in 1914 with his parents. By tracing the family's movement northward after the unexpected death of his father, this engaging chronicle illuminates the journeys not only of a black man born with heart disease in the southern Appalachian coalfields, but of his family and community. This testament to the importance of ordinary lives fills a gap in the literature on an underexamined aspect of American experience: the lives of African Americans in rural Appalachia and in the nonurban endpoints of the Great Migration.
by Jacqueline Jones
The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes.
In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, historian Jacqueline Jones offers a powerful account of the changing role of black women, lending a voice to an unsung struggle from the depths of slavery to the ongoing fight for civil rights. -Amazon
by S.R. Martin
In distinctive, engaging prose, S. R. Martin, Jr., crafts the story of his forebears and their westward journey, begun even before the great black migration that occurred around the two world wars.
By narrating the struggles and triumphs of his family—both paternal and maternal—during their move west, he illuminates an under-studied facet of African American history. As Martin explains it, he and his brother “arrived on the scene at the confluence of these family streams in time to catch a ride to the shining sea.”
Students, scholars, and interested general readers of modern African American history and sociology will be greatly rewarded by reading this warm and vivid personal and family memoir. -Amazon
by Elmer P. Martin and Joanne Mitchell Martin
Misunderstood and stereotyped, the black family in America has been viewed by some as pathologically weak while others have acclaimed its resilience and strength. Those who have drawn these conflicting conclusions have generally focused on the nuclear family—husband, wife, and dependent children. But as Elmer and Joanne Martin point out in this revealing book, a unit of this kind often is not the center of black family life. What appear to be fatherless, broken homes in our cities may really be vital parts of strong and flexible extended families based hundreds of miles away—usually in a rural area.
Through their eight-year study of some thirty extended families, the Martins find that economic pressures, including federal tax and welfare laws, have begun to make the extended family's flexibility into a liability that threatens its future. -Amazon
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by Robert Staples
A diverse collection of readings on trends and issues surrounding the African American family. This book provides a combination of empirical research and scholarly essays on such diverse issues in the African American community as the Black male's role, interracial relationships, poverty, AIDS, and the health status of Black women. -Amazon
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by Leslie Brown
In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post-Civil War liberation community into the "capital of the black middle class." African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, narratives, and family stories, Leslie Brown animates the history of this remarkable city from emancipation to the civil rights era, as freedpeople and their descendants struggled among themselves and with whites to give meaning to black freedom.
Brown paints Durham in the Jim Crow era as a place of dynamic change where despite common aspirations, gender and class conflicts emerged. Placing African American women at the center of the story, Brown describes how black Durham's multiple constituencies experienced a range of social conditions. Shifting the historical perspective away from seeing solidarity as essential to effective struggle or viewing dissent as a measure of weakness, Brown demonstrates that friction among African Americans generated rather than depleted energy, sparking many activist initiatives on behalf of the black community. -Amazon
by Jennifer Hamer
Absent fathers and households headed by single mothers are frequently blamed for the poor quality of life of African-American children. This book challenges these assumptions, arguing that they are largely an unfair reflection of non-working class white American values. Hamer places the behaviors of black non-custodial fathers in their social, political, and economic contexts and describes these fatherless families from the perspectives of the families themselves.
by Douglas Flamming
Paul Bontemps decided to move his family to Los Angeles from Louisiana in 1906 on the day he finally submitted to a strictly enforced Southern custom-he stepped off the sidewalk to allow white men who had just insulted him to pass by. Friends of the Bontemps family, like many others beckoning their loved ones West, had written that Los Angeles was "a city called heaven" for people of color. But just how free was Southern California for African Americans? This splendid history, at once sweeping in its historical reach and intimate in its evocation of everyday life, is the first full account of Los Angeles's black community in the half century before World War II. Filled with moving human drama, it brings alive a time and place largely ignored by historians until now, detailing African American community life and political activism during the city's transformation from small town to sprawling metropolis. Writing with a novelist's sensitivity to language and drawing from fresh historical research, Douglas Flamming takes us from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, through the Great Migration, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the build-up to World War II. Along the way, he offers rich descriptions of the community and its middle-class leadership, the women who were front and center with men in the battle against racism in the American West. In addition to drawing a vivid portrait of a little-known era, Flamming shows that the history of race in Los Angeles is crucial for our understanding of race in America. The civil rights activism in Los Angeles laid the foundation for critical developments in the second half of the century that continue to influence us to this day.
by James E. Teele
When E. Franklin Frazier was elected the first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948, he was established as the leading American scholar on the black family and was also recognized as a leading theorist on the dynamics of social change and race relations. By 1948 his lengthy list of publications included over fifty articles and four major books, including the acclaimed Negro Family in the United States. Frazier was known for his thorough scholarship and his mastery of skills in both history and sociology. With the publication of Bourgeoisie Noire in 1955 (translated in 1957 as Black Bourgeoisie), Frazier apparently set out on a different track, one in which he employed his skills in a critical analysis of the black middle class. The book met with mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe. While Frazier published four additional books after 1948, Black Bourgeoisie remained by far his most controversial. Given his status in American sociology, there has been surprisingly little study of Frazier's work. In E. Franklin Frazier and Black Bourgeoisie, a group of distinguished scholars remedies that lack, focusing on his often-scorned Black Bourgeoisie. This in-depth look at Frazier's controversial publication is relevant to the growing concerns about racism, problems in our cities, the limitations of affirmative action, and the promise of self-help.
by Beryl Satter
Part family story and part urban history, this work is a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago, and in cities across the nation. The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this book, the author identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country. It is not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. This is an account of a city in crisis; unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers, the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. The author shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. This tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.
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by Sydney Nathans
What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price- remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family's fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family- Susan and Peter Lesley- who protected and employed her. The author's sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker's remarkable persistence, as well as the sustained collaboration of the black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter. Unlike her more famous counterparts- Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth- who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker's efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker's journey, this book gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.
edited by Glory Edim
An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives--but not everyone regularly sees themselves on the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all--regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability--have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature. Contributors include Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing), Lynn Nottage (Sweat), Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn), Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face), Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish), and Barbara Smith (Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology). Whether it's learning about the complexities of femalehood from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, finding a new type of love in The Color Purple, or using mythology to craft an alternative black future, the subjects of each essay remind us why we turn to books in times of both struggle and relaxation. As she has done with her book club-turned-online community Well-Read Black Girl, in this anthology Glory Edim has created a space in which black women's writing and knowledge and life experiences are lifted up, to be shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world and ourselves.
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directed by Marlon Riggs
Is there an essential black identity? In this documentary, acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs explores the diversity of African American lifestyles and cultural expressions, even as many speakers bare their pain at having been called "too black," or conversely, "not black enough." Riggs brings viewers face-to-face with African-Americans young and old, rich and poor, rural and urban, gay and straight, while offering a powerful critique of sexism, homophobia, and colorism within the black community. Includes performances by choreographer Bill T. Jones and poet Essex Hemphill and commentary from noted cultural critics Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cornel West, and others.
by Mark Reid
Black Lenses, Black Voices is a provocative look at films directed and written-and sometimes produced-by African Americans, as well as black-oriented films whose directors and or screenwriters are not black. Taking us through the development of African American independent filmmaking before and after World War II, Mark A. Reid then illustrates the unique nature of African American family, action, horror, female-centered, and independent films, such as Eve's Bayou, Jungle Fever, Shaft, Souls of Sin, Bones, Waiting to Exhale, Monster's Ball, Sankofa, and many more.
Collection of Black women’s stories that show how leadership values are transmitted from mothers to daughters. -Amazon
by Brenda E. Stevenson
Life in the old South has always fascinated Americans--whether in the mythical portrayals of the planter elite from fiction such as Gone With the Wind or in historical studies that look inside the slave cabin. Now Brenda E. Stevenson presents a reality far more gripping than popular legend, even as she challenges the conventional wisdom of academic historians. Life in Black and White provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia--weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War.
. . .
In exploring the central role of the family, Brenda Stevenson offers a wealth of insight: we look into the lives of upper class women, who bore the oppressive weight of marriage and motherhood as practiced in the South and the equally burdensome roles of their husbands whose honor was tied to their ability to support and lead regardless of their personal preference; the yeoman farm family's struggle for respectability; and the marginal economic existence of free blacks and its undermining influence on their family life.
Most important, Stevenson breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like white, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. Stevenson destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery, even for those who belonged to such attentive masters as George Washington, allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households.
Meticulously researched, insightful, and moving, Life in Black and White offers our most detailed portrait yet of the reality of southern life. It forever changes our understanding of family and race relations during the reign of the peculiar institution in the American South. -Amazon
by Clifford Thompson
An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America. In the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson's What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else's. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions when the race-baiting Donald Trump ascends to the presidency -- elected by whites, whom Thompson had refused to judge as a group, and who make up the majority in this country Thompson had called his own. In the grip of contradictory emotions, Thompson turns for guidance to the wisdom of writers he admires while knowing that the answers to his questions about America ultimately lie in America itself. Through interviews with a small but varied group of Americans he hears sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country while trying to find his own answers -- conclusions based not on conventional wisdom or on what he would like to believe, but on what he sees.
by Erica Ball
In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class. Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like Freedom's Journal, the North Star, and the Anglo-African Magazine, Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an "antislavery life." Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call "the politics of respectability," African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals--simultaneously respectable and subversive--for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War.
by Claudio Saunt
Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices--to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship--were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country's racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.
Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William--both Creek Indians--had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America's racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.
Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other's existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America's past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of "blood" in the construction of identity.
Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience. -Amazon
by Tiffany Haddish
Stand-up comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish grew up in one of the poorest parts of South Central Los Angeles. Her mother wound up with a debilitating brain injury after surviving a car accident. Tiffany never fit in anywhere: not in the households she rotated through in the foster care system, and certainly not the nearly all white high school she had to ride the bus an hour to attend. As an illiterate ninth grader, Tiffany did everything she could to survive. After a multitude of jobs, she finally realized that she had talent in an area she never would have suspected: comedy. Tiffany faced the 'routine' hindrances of climbing the entertainment business ladder, but had the added obstacles of sex, race, and class in her way. But she got there. She's humble, grateful, down to earth, and funny as hell. She still cleans the toilet the way she was shown by a foster mom who worked as a maid, and she still rolls her joints the way one of her foster dads taught her. The Last Black Unicorn is a memoir of the struggles of a woman who was able to achieve her dreams by reveling in her pain and awkwardness, showing the world who she really is, and inspiring others through the power of laughter.
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by Herbert G. Gutman
This book provides an exhaustively researched history of black families in America from the days of slavery until just after the Civil War.
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by Theodore R. Kennedy
Examines black family life in a Southern community and the relationships of family members to each other and to the community in which they live.
by Mary Church Terrell
Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women's suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women's suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women's rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women's rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others. -Amazon
by Brittney C. Cooper
Beyond Respectability" charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how - and who - produced racial knowledge.
by Mary Church Terrell
The 20-page pamphlet you can read here focuses mainly on Stowe herself, and the role she played during her life in efforts to improve the lives of the country's black citizens. It contains only one passing reference (on page 17) to the racial discrimination that still made those lives so difficult at the time Terrell was writing. Its treatment of Uncle Tom, however, expresses no reservations about the novel. Tom himself she calls "a philosopher in mind, a saint at heart, and a martyr in death." -University of Virginia
by Joan Quigley
In Just Another Southern Town, Joan Quigley recounts an untold chapter of the civil rights movement: an epic battle to topple segregation in Washington, the symbolic home of American democracy. At the book's heart is the formidable Mary Church Terrell and the test case she mounts seeking to enforce Reconstruction-era laws prohibiting segregation in D.C. restaurants. Through the prism of Terrell's story, Quigley reassesses Washington's relationship to civil rights history, bringing to life a pivotal fight for equality that erupted five years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus and a decade before the student sit-in movement rocked segregated lunch counters across the South. -Amazon
edited with introductions by Richard W. Leeman and Bernard K. Duffy
Drawing upon nearly two hundred years of recorded African American oratory, The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches, edited by Richard W. Leeman and Bernard K. Duffy, brings together in one unique volume some of this tradition's most noteworthy speeches, each paired with an astute introduction designed to highlight its most significant elements. Arranged chronologically, from Maria Miller Stewart's 1832 speech "Why Sit Ye Here and Die?" to President Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address, these orations are tied to many of the key themes and events of American history, as well as the many issues and developments in American race relations. These themes, events, and issues include the changing roles of women, Native American relations, American "manifest destiny," abolitionism, the industrial revolution, Jim Crow, lynching, World War I and American self-determination, the rise of the New Deal and government social programs, the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, the Vietnam War, Nixon and Watergate, gay and lesbian rights, immigration, and the rise of a mediated culture. Leeman and Duffy have carefully selected the most eloquent and relevant speeches by African Americans, including those by Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and Marian Wright Edelman, many of which have never received significant scholarly attention. The Will of a People is the first book to pair the full texts of the most important African American orations with substantial introductory essays intended to guide the reader's understanding of the speaker, the speech, its rhetorical interpretation, and the historical context in which it occurred. Broadly representative of the African American experience, as well as what it means to be American, this valuable collection will serve as an essential guide to the African American oratory tradition.
Documents selected and interpreted by Alison M. Parker
Mary Church Terrell's international experiences and perspectives were reflected in her analysis of race relations and her call for racial justice in the United States. Terrell returned from her European visits with anti-colonial insights and fresh ammunition in her struggle against American racial prejudice. Her international experiences and perspectives allowed Terrell to approach the fight for civil rights as a broader, linked struggle for all women and people of color around the world. -Abstract
by Beverly Washington Jones
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edited by Sandra J. Sarkela, Susan Mallon Ross, and Margaret A. Lowe
In this “stunning collection of documents” (Washington Post Book World), African-American women speak of themselves, their lives, ambitions, and struggles from the colonial period to the present day. Theirs are stories of oppression and survival, of family and community self-help, of inspiring heroism and grass-roots organizational continuity in the face of racism, economic hardship, and, far too often, violence. Their vivid accounts, their strong and insistent voices, make for inspiring reading, enriching our understanding of the American past. -Amazon
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by Dorothy Sterling
Three heroic women whose stories, in the words of Margaret Walker, "every woman, man, and child should know": Ellen Craft, the daring runaway Georgia slave who used her freedom to serve the cause of abolition; Ida B. Wells, the firebrand journalist whose crusade against lynching awakened the consciousness of a nation; and Mary Church Terrell, a gifted and untiring leader in the movement for suffrage, civil rights, and world peace. Through painstaking research, Sterling not only produces a fascinating account of three outstanding leaders; she also documents the role hitherto "faceless, nameless millions of African American women" have played in shaping our culture and history. Reflecting and connecting the historical struggle of the years 1826 through 1954, Black Foremothers will captivate and inspire readers, young and old. -Amazon
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by Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene
Because scholars have traditionally only examined the efforts of American suffragists in relation to electoral politics, the history books have missed the story of what these women sought to achieve outside the realm of voting reform. Though Stanton, Anthony, and Mott are the best known figures of the woman's suffrage movement, all were dead more than a decade before women actually achieved the vote. Women like Alice Paul, Louisine Havermeyer, and Mary Church Terrell carried on their work, putting their campaign experiences to work long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. This book tells the story of how these women made an indelible mark on American history in fields ranging from education to art, science, publishing, and social activism.
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edited by Sandra J. Sarkela, Susan Mallon Ross, and Margaret A. Lowe
Until recently, scholars assumed that women stopped speaking after they won the vote in 1920 and did not reenter political life until the second wave of feminism began in the 1960s. Nothing could be further from the truth. While national attention did dissipate after 1920, women did not retreat from political and civic life. Rather, after winning the vote, women's public activism shifted from a single-issue agenda to the myriad social problems and public issues that faced the nation. As such, women began to take their place in the public square as political actors in their own rights rather than strictly campaigning for a women's issue.
This anthology documents women's activism during this period by introducing heretofore unpublished public speeches that address a wide array of debated topics including child labor, international relations, nuclear disarmament, consumerism, feminism and anti-feminism, social welfare, family life, war, and the environment. Some speeches were delivered in legislative forums, others at schools, churches, business meetings, and media events; still others before national political organizations. To ensure diversity, the volume features speakers of different ages, races, classes, ethnicities, geographic regions, and political persuasions. The volume editors include short biographical introductions as well as historical context for each selection. -Amazon
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The concept of 'human rights' as a universal goal is at the centre of the international stage. It is now a key part in discourse, treaties and in domestic jurisdictions. However, as this study shows, the debate around this development is actually about human rights law. This text scrutinizes the extent to which legalization shapes the human rights ideal, and surveys its ethical, political and practical repercussions. How does the law influence what we think about rights? What more is there to such rights than their legal protection?nbsp;These expert contributors approach these questionsnbsp;from a range of perspectives: political theory/moral theory, anthropology, sociology, international law, international politics and political science, to deliver a diversity of methodologies. This book is essential reading for those wishing to develop a clear understanding of the relationship between human rights ideals and laws and for those working toward the fostering of a genuinenbsp;human rights culture.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Born of a shared revulsion against the horrors of the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has become the single most important statement of international ethics. It was inspired by and reflects the full scope of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous four freedoms: "the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear." Written by a UN commission led by Eleanor Roosevelt and adopted in 1948, the Declaration has become the moral backbone of more than two hundred human rights instruments that are now a part of our world. The result of a truly international negotiating process, the document has been a source of hope and inspiration to thousands of groups and millions of oppressed individuals.
Daniel Whelan illustrates how the rhetoric of indivisibility has frequently been used to further political ends that have little to do with protecting the rights of the individual. Drawing on scores of original documents, he reveals the conflicts and compromises behind a half century of human rights discourse.
The book takes the reader on a journey to unexplored sources of human rights: ancient China, the golden age of Islam and 16th century Spain. All three share a strong belief in reason, justice and human dignity.
Globalization, interdisciplinarity, and the critique of the Eurocentric canon are transforming the theory and practice of human rights. This collection takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the authors construct a new history and theory of human rig ...
Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights--a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that "the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights." As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices "over there." By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human rights in practice, can be found in our own backyard. Human Rights in Our Own Backyard examines the state of human rights and responses to human rights issues, drawing on sociological literature and perspectives to interrogate assumptions of American exceptionalism. How do people in the U.S. address human rights issues? What strategies have they adopted, and how successful have these strategies been? Essays are organized around key conventions of human rights, focusing on the relationships between human rights and justice, the state and the individual, civil rights and human rights, and group rights versus individual rights. The contributors are united by a common conception of the human rights enterprise as a process involving not only state-defined and implemented rights but also human rights from below as promoted by activists.
Public schools could be the very place where children come to understand they have rights. Unfortunately, many children do not get this information. Instead the protections stated in the CRC and the realities of the lives of so many children are often worlds apart. This volume sets out to be a part of changing this.
This engaging collection surveys and clarifies the complex issue of federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. Den Ouden and O'Brien gather focused and teachable essays on key topics, debates, and case studies. Written by leading scholars in the field, including historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and political scientists, the essays cover the history of recognition, focus on recent legal and cultural processes, and examine contemporary recognition struggles nationwide. Contributors are Joanne Barker (Lenape), Kathleen A. Brown-Perez (Brothertown), Rosemary Cambra (Muwekma Ohlone), Amy E. Den Ouden, Timothy Q. Evans (Haliwa-Saponi), Les W. Field, Angela A. Gonzales (Hopi), Rae Gould (Nipmuc), J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), K. Alexa Koenig, Alan Leventhal, Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), John Robinson, Jonathan Stein, Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke), and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee).
A guide to womens' rights the world over -- part of our new Small Guides to Big Issues series published in asssocation with Oxfam
While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus. Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible "for the revolution," and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics--including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty--for feminist discourse.
How can one negotiate and integrate the claims of feminism and multiculturalism through a discourse of rights? This is a timely question: the apparent opposition between feminist and multicultural justice is a central problem in contemporary political theory. It also responds to a deep suspicion about invoking a political discourse that is accused of being either eurocentric, androcentric or both.In this book Monica Mookherjee draws on Iris Young's idea of 'gender as seriality' in order to reconfigure feminism in a way that responds to cultural diversity. She contends that a discourse of rights can be formulated and that this task is crucial to negotiating a balance between women's interests and multicultural claims.The argument is worked through in the context of a set of difficult dilemmas in modern liberal democracies:*the resurgence of the feminist controversy over the Hindu practice of widow-immolation (sati)*gender-discriminatory Muslim divorce laws in the famous Shah Bano controversy in India*forced marriage in South Asian communities in the UK*the rights of evangelical Christian parents to exempt their children from secular education*the recent controversy about the rights of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in state schools in FranceThis valuable and innovative perspective on an important contemporary issue aims to stimulate debate about a set of important concepts central to discourses of feminism and multiculturalism in contemporary political philosophy, including human rights and capabilities, toleration, citizenship practices, cultural rights, the ethic of care, communitarianism and the politics of recognition.
Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women's rights movement in the United States and beyond. In The Road To Seneca Falls, Judith Wellman offers the first well documented, full-length account of this historic meeting in its contemporary context. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is this convergence, she argues, that foments one of the greatest rebellions of modern times. Rather than working heavy-handedly downward from their official "Declaration of Sentiments," Wellman works upward from richly detailed documentary evidence to construct a complex tapestry of causes that lay behind the convention, bringing the struggle to life. Her approach results in a satisfying combination of social, community, and reform history with individual and collective biographical elements. The Road to Seneca Falls challenges all of us to reflect on what it means to be an American trying to implement the belief that "all men and women are created equal," both then and now. A fascinating story in its own right, it is also a seminal piece of scholarship for anyone interested in history, politics, or gender.
Historians have long agreed that women--black and white--were instrumental in shaping the civil rights movement. Until recently, though, such claims have not been supported by easily accessed texts of speeches and addresses. With this first-of-its-kind anthology, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon present thirty-nine full-text addresses by women who spoke out while the struggle was at its most intense. Beginning with the Brown decision in 1954 and extending through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the editors chronicle the unique and important rhetorical contributions made by such well-known activists as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Daisy Bates, Lillian Smith, Mamie Till-Mobley, Lorraine Hansberry, Dorothy Height, and Rosa Parks. They also include speeches from lesser-known but influential leaders such as Della Sullins, Marie Foster, Johnnie Carr, Jane Schutt, and Barbara Posey. Nearly every speech was discovered in local, regional, or national archives, and many are published or transcribed from audiotape here for the first time. Houck and Dixon introduce each speaker and occasion with a headnote highlighting key biographical and background details. The editors also provide a general introduction that places these public addresses in context. Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 gives voice to stalwarts whose passionate orations were vital to every phase of a movement that changed America.
Nearing the end of a distinguished literary career that spanned nearly fifty years, Langston Hughes took on the daunting task of writing the official history of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Beginning with the social, political, and economic contexts that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909 and ending with a summary of its targeted goals for 1963, Hughes attempted to write a history that would be comprehensive in scope and singular in its purpose of highlighting the ways in which the Association had a direct and positive influence on racial justice in the United States. Focusing on the individuals who had the greatest impact on the NAACP and the issues with which the organization was most concerned in its first fifty years of existence, Hughes produced the widely acclaimed Fight for Freedom, striking an exceptional balance between biography and cultural history. Long before the publication of Fight for Freedom, Hughes had begun writing nonfictional prose about these same issues as a regular columnist and essayist for the nation's most influential African American publications, including the Chicago Defender and Crisis. A selection of these popular columns and other essays - which reveal the extent to which Hughes's unique, varied, and sometimes Blues- tinged narrative voice shifted in tone over the course of his extensive career - is included in this volume. Hughes intersperses historical facts with compelling anecdotes that often frame subtly ironic commentaries on various themes. The result is history that provides a lens through which to view Hughes's attitudes in the early 1960s toward the ways the NAACP addressed the vital social, cultural, political, and economic issues central to its agenda. Fight for Freedom and Other Writings on Civil Rights makes a unique contribution to the oeuvre of an African American writer whose full significance to American literature, history, and culture will continue to be defined well into the twenty-first century
The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South examines the most visible outcome of the Southern Indian Rights Movement: state Indian affairs commissions. In recalling political activism in the post-World War II South, rarely does one consider the political activities of American Indians as they responded to desegregation, the passing of the Civil Rights Acts, and the restructuring of the American political party system. Native leaders and activists across the South created a social and political movement all their own, which drew public attention to the problems of discrimination, poverty, unemployment, low educational attainment, and poor living conditions in tribal communities. While tribal-state relationships have historically been characterized as tense, most southern tribes--particularly non-federally recognized ones--found that Indian affairs commissions offered them a unique position in which to negotiate power. Although individual tribal leaders experienced isolated victories and generated some support through the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of the intertribal state commissions in the 1970s and 1980s elevated the movement to a more prominent political level. Through the formalization of tribal-state relationships, Indian communities forged strong networks with local, state, and national agencies while advocating for cultural preservation and revitalization, economic development, and the implementation of community services. This book looks specifically at Alabama and Louisiana, places of intensive political activity during the civil rights era and increasing Indian visibility and tribal reorganization in the decades that followed. Between 1960 and 1990, U.S. census records show that Alabama's Indian population swelled by a factor of twelve and Louisiana's by a factor of five. Thus, in addition to serving as excellent examples of the national trend of a rising Indian population, the two states make interesting case studies because their Indian commissions brought formerly disconnected groups, each with different goals and needs, together for the first time, creating an assortment of alliances and divisions.
In the uneasily shared history of Jews and blacks in America, the struggle for civil rights in the South may be the least understood episode. Fight against Fear is the first book to focus on Jews and African Americans in that remarkable place and time. Mindful of both communities' precarious and contradictory standings in the South, Clive Webb tells a complex story of resistance and complicity, conviction and apathy. Webb begins by ranging over the experiences of southern Jews up to the eve of the civil rights movement--from antebellum slaveowners to refugees who fled Hitler's Europe only to arrive in the Jim Crow South. He then shows how the historical burden of ambivalence between Jews and blacks weighed on such issues as school desegregation, the white massive resistance movement, and business boycotts and sit-ins. As many Jews grappled as never before with the ways they had become--and yet never could become--southerners, their empathy with African Americans translated into scattered, individual actions rather than any large-scale, organized alliance between the two groups. The reasons for this are clear, Webb says, once we get past the notion that the choices of the much larger, less conservative, and urban-centered Jewish populations of the North define those of all American Jews. To understand Jews in the South we must look at their particular circumstances: their small numbers and wide distribution, denominational rifts, and well-founded anxiety over defying racial and class customs set by the region's white Protestant majority. For better or worse, we continue to define the history of Jews and blacks in America by its flash points. By setting aside emotions and shallow perceptions, Fight against Fear takes a substantial step toward giving these two communities the more open and evenhanded consideration their shared experiences demand.
What started as a hashtag in 2013 quickly grew into the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter examines the police shootings that fueled the movement, the events that led up to racial tensions in the United States, and the goals the movement has set for the future. Easy-to-read text, vivid images, and helpful back matter give readers a clear look at this subject. Features include a table of contents, infographics, a glossary, additional resources, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Core Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
This concise yet comprehensive reference book provides an overview of the Black Lives Matter movement, from its emergence in response to the police-involved deaths of unarmed black people to its development as a force for racial justice in America. * Provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the origin, growth, and development of the Black Lives Matter movement * Explores how modern activists employ social media as a force for social change * Examines the emergence of white supremacy and white nationalism as a part of a cultural backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement * Presents current information and statistics on racial injustice in America * Explores how the civil rights movement, Black Power movement, and hip-hop culture have shaped and influenced the fight for racial justice
This ethnography explores what transnational LGBT human rights advocates actually do on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on thirteen months of field research at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), the book explores how the first transnational LGBT human rights NGO formed and evolved, who is engaged in this work, how they conceptualise LGBT human rights, what they do to promote LGBT human rights transnationally, and how they have institutionalised their views at the UN and elsewhere.
What are the consequences when international actors step in to protect LGBT people from discrimination with programs that treat their sexualities in isolation from the "facts on the ground"? Robert Lorway tells the story of the unexpected effects of The Rainbow Project (TRP), a LGBT rights program for young Namibians begun in response to President Nujoma's notorious hate speeches against homosexuals. Lorway highlights the unintended consequences of this program, many of which ran counter to the goals of local and international policy makers and organizers. He shows how TRP inadvertently diminished civil opportunities at the same time as it sought to empower youth to claim their place in Namibian culture and society. Tracking the fortunes of TRP over several years, Namibia’s Rainbow Project poses questions about its effectiveness in the faces of class distinction and growing inequality. It also speaks to ongoing problems for Western sexual minority rights programs in Africa in the midst of political violence, heated debates over anti-discrimination laws, and government-sanctioned anti-homosexual rhetoric.
Finally--a comparative overview of sexuality and human rights issues and law! Human rights issues exist globally, particularly when they have to do with sexuality. Sexuality and Human Rights: A Global Overview focuses on the controversial issues of human sexuality and the legal challenges that LGBT individuals face. Internationally recognized legal experts thoroughly discuss the status of important human rights laws pertaining to sexuality from around the world. Reviewing the progression from historical foundations and shifting public opinions through the most recent landmark legal cases, this is an essential resource on the present state of human rights laws and sexuality. This unique, up-to-date examination of the legal issues involving LGBT individuals' rights around the world reviews the latest rulings, such as the adoption of minors by homosexual or bisexual parents, the legal acceptance of marriage between same-sex couples, whether the gender-reassigned can be legally considered their true gender identity, and much, much more. Sexuality and Human Rights: A Global Overview illustrates the journey our worldwide legal systems have traveled, and the path stretching before them, until the destination of equality and acceptance in sexuality may finally be reached. Well-referenced, comprehensive, and yet accessible to the general reader, this book provides a crucial, provocative look at just what basic sexual human rights means in today's laws. Some of the topics of Sexuality and Human Rights: A Global Overview include: perspectives and objectives to challenge discrimination sexuality and international human rights law sexuality and human rights in Australian law transsexuals issues in European human rights law sexual orientation and gender identity legal issues in North America the present state of sexuality and human rights in European law the Asian legal perspective on sexuality and human rights laws pertaining to sexual identity issues Sexuality and Human Rights: A Global Overview is a vital reference source for law educators, law students, gay rights activists, and law reformers.
To date, media and scholarly attention to gay politics and policy has focused on the morality debates over sexual orientation and the legal aspects of rights for non-heterosexuals. However, transgender concerns as such have received little attention. As transgender activism has become more visible, policymakers, both in the United States and around the world, have begun to respond to demands for more equitable treatment. Jami K. Taylor and Donald P. Haider-Markel bring together new research employing the concepts and tools of political science to explore the politics of transgender rights. Volume contributors address the framing of transgender rights in the U.S. and in Latin America. They discuss transgender interest groups, the inclusion of transgender activists in advocacy coalitions, policy diffusion at the state and local levels, and, importantly, the implementation of transgender public policy. This volume sets the standard for empirical research on transgender politics and demonstrates that the study of this topic can contribute to the understanding of larger questions in the field of political science.
An innovative, data-driven explanation of how public opinion shifted on LGBTQ rights The Path to Gay Rights is the first social science analysis of how and why the LGBTQ movement achieved its most unexpected victory---transforming gay people from a despised group of social deviants into a minority worthy of rights and protections in the eyes of most Americans. The book weaves together a narrative of LGBTQ history with new findings from the field of political psychology to provide an understanding of how social movements affect mass attitudes in the United States and globally. Using data going back to the 1970s, the book argues that the current understanding of how social movements change mass opinion--through sympathetic media coverage and endorsements from political leaders--cannot provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenal success of the LGBTQ movement at changing the public's views. In The Path to Gay Rights, Jeremiah Garretson argues that the LGBTQ community's response to the AIDS crisis was a turning point for public support of gay rights. ACT-UP and related AIDS organizations strategically targeted political and media leaders, normalizing news coverage of LGBTQ issues and AIDS and signaled to LGBTQ people across the United States that their lives were valued. The net result was an increase in the number of LGBTQ people who came out and lived their lives openly, and with increased contact with gay people, public attitudes began to warm and change. Garretson goes beyond the story of LGBTQ rights to develop an evidence-based argument for how social movements can alter mass opinion on any contentious topic.
In The Stranger Next Door, Alrene Stein explores how a small community with a declining industrial economy became the site of a bitter battle over gay rights. Fearing job loss and a feeling of being left behind, one Oregon town's working-class residents allied with religious conservatives to deny the civil liberties of queer men and women. In a book that combines strong on-the-ground research and lucid analysis with a novelist's imaginative sympathy, Stein's exploration of how fear and uncertainty can cause citizens to shift blame onto "strangers" provides insight into the challenges the country faces in the age of Trump. Winner of the 2001 Ruth Benedict Award
Combining firsthand ethnographic reportage with historical research, Human Rights as War by Other Means traces the use of rights discourse in Northern Ireland's politics from the local civil rights campaigns of the 1960s to present-day activism for truth recovery and LGBT equality.
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Photo: Toto- The Windsor Indian. King Philip’s Stockade- Springfield, MA. Photo Credit to Rusty Clark on commons.wikimedia.org. Text added to original image.
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Written by renowned authorities and enriched with legends, eyewitness accounts, quotations, and haunting memories from many different Native American cultures, this history depicts these peoples and their way of life from the time of Columbus to the 20th century. Illustrated throughout with stunning works of Native American art, specially commissioned photographs, and beautifully drawn maps.
"Visions for the Future celebrates contemporary Native American artists and shares their unique views on the twenty-first century. These provocative works capture the vivid emergence taking shape in the Native American art world. Each piece is accompanied by the young artists' perspectives on art, identity, and the future of Indian Country."--Back cover (Volume 1).
Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book. #Not Your Princess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.
Three powerful tales from the acclaimed chronicler of the American West--including the #1 New York Times bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Two profoundly moving, candid histories and a powerful novel illuminate important aspects of the Native American story. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: The #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West, Dee Brown's groundbreaking history focuses on the betrayals, battles, and systematic slaughter suffered by Native American tribes between 1860 and 1890, culminating in the Sioux massacre at Wounded Knee. "Shattering, appalling, compelling . . . One wonders, reading this searing, heartbreaking book, who, indeed, were the savages" (The Washington Post). The Fetterman Massacre: A riveting account of events leading up to the Battle of the Hundred Slain--the devastating 1866 conflict at Wyoming's Ft. Phil Kearney that pitted Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors--including Oglala chief Red Cloud, against the United States cavalry under the command of Captain William Fetterman. Based on a wealth of historical resources and sparked by Brown's narrative genius, this is an essential look at one of the frontier's defining conflicts. Creek Mary's Blood: This New York Times bestseller fictionalizes the true story of Mary Musgrove--born in 1700 to a Creek tribal chief--and five generations of her family. The sweeping narrative spans the Revolutionary War, the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War--in which Mary's descendants fought on both sides of the conflict. Rich in detail and human drama, Creek Mary's Blood offers "a robust, unfussed crash-course in Native American history that rolls from East to West with dark, inexorable energy" (Kirkus Reviews).
A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY: A CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF ITS PLACE ON THE WORLD STAGE. Native American History is a breakthrough reference guide, the first book of its kind to recognize and explore the rich, unfolding experiences of the indigenous American peoples as they evolved against a global backdrop. This fascinating historical narrative, presented in an illuminating and thought-provoking time-line format, sheds light on such events as: * The construction of pyramids--not only on the banks of the Nile but also on the banks of the Mississippi * The development of agriculture in both Mesopotamia and Mexico * The European discovery of a continent already inhabited by some 50 million people * The Native American influence on the ideas of the European Renaissance * The unacknowledged advancements in science and medicine created by the civilizations of the new world * Western Expansion and its impact on Native American land and traditions * The key contributions Native Americans brought to the Allied victory of World War II And much more! This invaluable history takes an important first step toward a true understanding of the depth, breadth, and scope of a long-neglected aspect of our heritage.
Dispelling myths, answering questions, and stimulating thoughtful avenues for further inquiry, this highly absorbing reference provides a wealth of specific information about over 200 North American Indian groups in Canada and the United States. Readers will easily access important historicaland contemporary facts about everything from notable leaders and relations with non-natives to customs, dress, dwellings, weapons, government, and religion. This book is at once exhaustive and captivating, covering myriad aspects of a people spread across a continent.Divided into ten geographic areas for easy reference, this work illustrates each Native American group in careful detail. Listed alphabetically, starting with the tribal name, translation, origin, and definition, each entry includes significant facts about the group's location and population, aswell as impressive accounts of the group's history and culture. Bringing entries up-to-date, Barry Pritzker also presents current information on each group's government, economy, legal status, and land holdings. Whether interpreting the term "tribe" (many traditional Native American groups were nottribes at all but more like extended families) or describing how a Shoshone woman served as a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition, Pritzker always presents the material in a clear and lively manner.In light of past and ongoing injustices and the momentum of Indian and Inuit self-determination movements, an understanding of Native American cultures as well as their contributions to contemporary society becomes increasingly important. A magnificent resource, this book liberally provides theessential information necessary to better grasp the history and cultures of North American Indians.
This must-have book investigates the issues surrounding the forming of reservations, areas of land chosen by the United States government. Were the Native Americans treated fairly? Beginning with the first European explorers and continuing to the present, author Anita Louis McCormick examines the history of the conflicts and resolutions between the United States government and Native Americans.
From Abenaki to Lakota to Navajo, Native Americans have a rich and complex history. Geronimo, Chief Little Robe--they speak of their respect for the land, of tradition, and of how the colonization of America changed their lives forever. With sensitivity and grace, Native American author, poet, and storyteller Joseph Bruchac combines these stirring memoirs to create a compelling portrait of a proud and determined people.
Offers profiles of one hundred Native American women involved in social activism, literature, politics, medicine, and the arts.
Avant-garde art between 1910 and 1950 is well known for its use of "primitive" imagery, often borrowed from traditional cultures in Africa and Oceania. Less recognized, however, is the use United States artists made of Native American art, myth, and ritual to craft a specifically American Modernist art. In this ground-breaking study, W. Jackson Rushing comprehensively explores the process by which Native American iconography was appropriated, transformed, and embodied in American avant-garde art of the Modernist period.Writing from the dual perspectives of cultural and art history, Rushing shows how national exhibitions of Native American art influenced such artists and patrons as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Henri, John Marin, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and especially Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings he convincingly links with the sand paintings of the Navajo. He traces the avant-garde adoption of Native American cultural forms to anxiety over industrialism and urbanism, post-World War I "return to roots" nationalism, the New Deal search for American strengths and values, and the notion of the "dark" Jungian unconscious current in the 1940s.
This anthology collects over twenty trickster stories, in graphic novel format, from various Native American traditions, including tales about coyotes, rabbits, ravens, and other crafty creatures and their mischievous activities. All cultures have tales of the trickster, a crafty creature or being who uses cunning to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. He disrupts the order of things, often humiliating others and sometimes himself. In Native American traditions, the trickster takes many forms, from coyote or rabbit to raccoon or raven. This graphic anthology of Native American trickster tales brings together Native American folklore and the world of comics. More than twenty Native American tales are adapted into comic form. Each story is written by a different Native American storyteller who worked closely with a selected illustrator, a combination that gives each tale a unique and powerful voice and look. Ranging from serious and dramatic to funny and sometimes downright fiendish, these tales bring tricksters back into popular culture in a very vivid form.
They come from the Pawnee, Iroquois, Algonquin, Inuit, Navajo, Sioux, and Hopi--and every one of these myths reveals the richness and depth of Native American culture, with its honored traditions and rituals. Born out of a deep sensitivity and respect for nature, they are exquisitely beautiful and contain the most profound spiritual and emotional truths. Through these legends, meet the Master of Life, who created the world; Thunderbird, who brings the storms; Grandmother Spiderwoman, who descends Earth to spin her silk; Coyote and his friends; as well a cast of other intriguing characters central to various Indian nations' cosmology. As part of an ancient heritage, these stories are a lasting tribute to the imaginative power and worldview of the first Americans.
2018 Outstanding Academic Title, selected by Choice Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press is the first comprehensive collection of writings by students and well-known Native American authors who published in boarding school newspapers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students used their acquired literacy in English along with more concrete tools that the boarding schools made available, such as printing technology, to create identities for themselves as editors and writers. In these roles they sought to challenge Native American stereotypes and share issues of importance to their communities. Writings by Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear are paired with the works of lesser-known writers to reveal parallels and points of contrast between students and generations. Drawing works primarily from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Pennsylvania), the Hampton Institute (Virginia), and the Seneca Indian School (Oklahoma), Jacqueline Emery illustrates how the boarding school presses were used for numerous and competing purposes. While some student writings appear to reflect the assimilationist agenda, others provide more critical perspectives on the schools' agendas and the dominant culture. This collection of Native-authored letters, editorials, essays, short fiction, and retold tales published in boarding school newspapers illuminates the boarding school legacy and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, Native American literary production.
For decades, most American Indians have lived in cities, not on reservations or in rural areas. Still, scholars, policymakers, and popular culture often regard Indians first as reservation peoples, living apart from non-Native Americans. In this book, Nicolas Rosenthal reorients our understanding of the experience of American Indians by tracing their migration to cities, exploring the formation of urban Indian communities, and delving into the shifting relationships between reservations and urban areas from the early twentieth century to the present. With a focus on Los Angeles, which by 1970 had more Native American inhabitants than any place outside the Navajo reservation, Reimagining Indian Country shows how cities have played a defining role in modern American Indian life and examines the evolution of Native American identity in recent decades. Rosenthal emphasizes the lived experiences of Native migrants in realms including education, labor, health, housing, and social and political activism to understand how they adapted to an urban environment, and to consider how they formed--and continue to form--new identities. Though still connected to the places where indigenous peoples have preserved their culture, Rosenthal argues that Indian identity must be understood as dynamic and fully enmeshed in modern global networks.
"The organizing principle for this anthology is the common Native American heritage of its authors; and yet that thread proves to be the most tenuous of all, as the experience of indigeneity differs radically for each of them. While many experience a centripetal pull toward a cohesive Indian experience, the indications throughout these essays lean toward a richer, more illustrative panorama of difference. What tends to bind them together are not cultural practices or spiritual attitudes per se, but rather circumstances that have no exclusive province in Indian country: that is, first and foremost, poverty, and its attendant symptoms of violence, substance abuse, and both physical and mental illness ... Education plays a critical role in such lives: many of the authors recall adoring school as young people, as it constituted a place of escape and a rare opportunity to thrive ... While many of the writers do return to their tribal communities after graduation, ideas about 'home' become more malleable and complicated."--The IntroductionI Am Where I Come From presents the autobiographies of thirteen Native American undergraduates and graduates of Dartmouth College, ten of them current and recent students. Twenty years ago, Cornell University Press published First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, also about the experiences of Native American students at Dartmouth College. I Am Where I Come From addresses similar themes and experiences, but it is very much a new book for a new generation of college students. Three of the essays from the earlier book are gathered into a section titled "Continuing Education," each followed by a shorter reflection from the author on his or her experience since writing the original essay. All three have changed jobs multiple times, returned to school for advanced degrees, started and increased their families, and, along the way, continuously revised and refined what it means to be Indian. The autobiographies contained in I Am Where I Come From explore issues of native identity, adjustment to the college environment, cultural and familial influences, and academic and career aspirations. The memoirs are notable for their eloquence and bravery.
In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675-76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676-1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.
In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley--including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians--from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage.Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged-- sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively--with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders--Iroquois as well as Dutch and English--the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.
"Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England's Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions. Dawnland Voices introduces readers to the compelling and unique literary heritage in New England, banishing the misconception that "real" Indians and their traditions vanished from that region centuries ago."-- Provided by publisher.
Provides an introduction to an aspect of Native American culture heretofore never explored in such careful regard for the religious and cultural sensitivities.
After a career working and living with American Indians and studying their traditions, Barre Toelken has written this sweeping study of Native American folklore in the West. Within a framework of performance theory, cultural worldview, and collaborative research, he examines Native American visual arts, dance, oral tradition (story and song), humor, and patterns of thinking and discovery to demonstrate what can be gleaned from Indian traditions by Natives and non-Natives alike. In the process he considers popular distortions of Indian beliefs, demystifies many traditions by showing how they can be comprehended within their cultural contexts, considers why some aspects of Native American life are not meant to be understood by or shared with outsiders, and emphasizes how much can be learned through sensitivity to and awareness of cultural values. Winner of the 2004 Chicago Folklore Prize, The Anguish of Snails is an essential work for the collection of any serious reader in folklore or Native American studies.
Tthese legends come from Native American peoples across the U.S. Richly illustrated with original art, they capture a wide range of belief systems and wisdom from the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Hopi, Lenape, Maidu, Seminole, Seneca, and other tribes.
In Native American legend, the thirteen scales on Old Turtle's back hold the key to the thirteen cycles of the moon and the changing seasons. These lyrical poems and striking paintings celebrate the wonder of the seasons, from the Northern Cheyenne's Moon of the Popping Trees to the Big Moon of the Abenaki.
Sky Loom offers a dazzling introduction to Native American myths, stories, and songs drawn from previous collections by acclaimed translator and poet Brian Swann. With a general introduction by Swann, Sky Loom is a stunning collection that provides a glimpse into the intricacies and beauties of story and myth, placing them in their cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts. Each of the twenty-six selections is translated and introduced by a well-known expert on Native oral literatures and offers entry into the cultures and traditions of several different tribes and bands, including the Yupiit and the Tlingits of the polar North; the Coast Salish and the Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest; the Navajos, the Pimas, and the Yaquis of the Southwest; the Lakota Sioux and the Plains Crees of the Great Plains; the Ojibwes of the Great Lakes; the Naskapis and the Eastern Crees of the Hudson Bay area in Canada; and the Munsees of the Northeast. Sky Loom takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through literary traditions older than the "discovery" of the New World.
A collection of sixty poems from many tribal groups giving one an insight into the world of Native Americans.
"Long overdue, this powerful collection allows Native American women to speak in their own voices---in a wide range of writing styles and covering a broad array of themes." ---Kathy A. Perkins, University of Illinois Footpaths and Bridges celebrates the vitality and diversity of Native American women, collecting plays by leading contemporary playwrights in forms ranging from realism to dramatic poetry, from a children's story to a musical, and from full-length plays to one-acts. The collection represents the best of a burgeoning theatrical movement, with work ranging from ETHNOSTRESS---a humorous take on art and identity politics---to the biographical musical Te Ata to a retelling of the Thanksgiving story from the Wampanoag perspective. The work of these award-winning playwrights is accompanied by critical commentary that illuminates Native American women's theater practices and perspectives, highlighting the issues of heritage, identity, and changing lifestyles that the plays imaginatively tackle. Featuring work from a wide array of tribes and geographic regions, the collection affords the artist, scholar, and general reader access to previously unheard voices that communicate the complexity and the diversity of the Native American experience. The far-ranging genres and content of the plays suggest the many possibilities for communicating the past and the present, the personal and the political, and the stunning kaleidoscope of Native American life and art. Shirley A. Huston-Findley is Associate Professor of Theatre at the College of Wooster. Rebecca Howard is Instructor of Women's Studies at Miami University. Photo: Set from production of JudyLee Oliva's Te Ata at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, 2006. Set design by Robert Cothran; photo by Michael Bendure. Plays in the collection include ETHNOSTRESS: Women's Voices in Native American Theatre by Monique Mojica Asivak's Creation Story by Jules Arita Koostachin with Jennifer Fell Hayes Bring the Children Home by Marcie Rendon The Girl Who Swam Forever by Marie Clements Harvest Ceremony: Beyond the Thanksgiving Myth by Martha Kreipe de Montaño with Jennifer Fell Hayes Letters by Denise Mosley Ola Nä Iwi (The Bones Live) by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl Strength of Indian Women by Vera Manuel Te Ata by JudyLee Oliva Winnetou's Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City by Spiderwoman Theater
Provides brief biographical information on eleven Native American women writers and discusses their work through critical excerpts. Includes a bibliography of works written by each featured author.
Sometimes described as "America's deadliest war, " King Philip's War proved a critical turning point in the history of New England, leaving English colonists decisively in command of the region at the expense of native peoples. Although traditionally understood as an inevitable clash of cultures or as a classic example of conflict on the frontier between Indians and whites, in the view of James D. Drake it was neither. Instead, he argues, King Philip's War was a civil war, whose divisions cut across ethnic lines and tore apart a society composed of English colonizers and Native Americans alike.
According to Drake, the interdependence that developed between English and Indian in the years leading up to the war helps explain its notorious brutality. Believing they were dealing with an internal rebellion and therefore with an act of treason, the colonists and their native allies often meted out harsh punishments. The end result was nothing less than the decimation of New England's indigenous peoples and the consequent social, political, and cultural reorganization of the region.
In short, by waging war among themselves, the English and Indians of New England destroyed the world they had constructed together. In its place a new society emerged, one in which native peoples were marginalized and the culture of the New England Way receded into the past.
A rich diversity of attitude, experience, and literary style can be seen in I Tell You Now. For these Native American writers, being caught between two cultures has sharpened the struggle for self-identity and a sense of self-worth. They describe their bittersweet memories of childhood and family life, their fight against prejudice and poverty, their triumph over personal problems, their role models and schooling, their reverence for the land and anger over the rape of it, and their sources of artistic inspiration. Metaphorically or literally, they do go home again—to a proud and dignified cultural heritage. And the vehicle for these inheritors of an oral tradition is the written word. In their introduction, the editors, Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, trace the history of Native American autobiography in its various forms.
A collection of poems, prose poems, mini-essays, and fragments of stories, woven together in a tapestry of pain about death by fire and survival by endurance on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
Resources and Readings
edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat
Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student.
edited by Tracy Crow
A collection of 32 essays written by both veterans and family members describing their experiences from conflicts spanning World War II to Afghanistan.
edited by David C. DiRamio
With the passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2008, more than 1.4 million service members and their families became eligible for higher education benefits, and veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan enrolled in colleges and universities in record numbers. The first wave of research about these new student veterans focused mostly on describing their characteristics and the transition from military service to civilian life and the college campus. This new edited collection presents findings from the second wave of research about student veterans, with a focus on data-driven evidence of academic success factors, including persistence, retention, degree completion, and employment after college.
by
This powerful collection juxtaposes 48 self-posed photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of women at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women from all five branches of the military share their stories here - stories that are by turns moving, comic, thought-provoking, and profound. Seeing their faces in stunning color photographic portraits and reading what they have to say about loss, comradeship, conflict, and hard choices will change the ways we think about women and war.
by Suzanne Gordon
In The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare, award-winning author Suzanne Gordon takes us to the front lines of federal policymaking and healthcare delivery, as it affects eight million Americans whose military service makes them eligible for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) coverage. Gordon's collected dispatches provide insight and information too often missing from mainstream media reporting on the VHA and from Capitol Hill debates about its future. Drawing on interviews with veterans and their families, VHA staff and administrators, health care policy experts and Congressional decision makers, Gordon describes a federal agency under siege that nevertheless accomplishes its difficult mission of serving men and women injured, in myriad ways, while on active duty. The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare is an essential primer on VHA care and a call to action by veterans, their advocacy organizations, and political allies. Without lobbying efforts and broader public understanding of what's at stake, a system now functioning far better than most private hospital systems may end up looking more like them, to the detriment of patients and providers alike.
by Jeremy M. Teigen
The assumptions that military service helps candidates attract votes - while lacking it harms a candidate's chances - has been an article of faith since the electoral coronation of George Washington in 1789. Perhaps the most compelling fact driving the perception that military service helps win votes is the large number of veterans who have held public office. Some candidates even exaggerate their military service to persuade voters. However, sufficient counter-examples undermine the idea that military veterans enjoy an advantage when seeking political office. In Why Veterans Run, Jeremy Teigen explains the tendency of parties to elevate those with armed forces experience to run for high office. He describes the veteran candidate phenomenon by examining the related factors and patterns, showing why different eras have more former generals running and why the number of veterans in election cycles varies. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Why Veterans Run investigates each postwar era in U.S. electoral history and elaborates why so many veterans run for office. Teigen also reveals how election outcomes with veteran candidates illuminate the relationship between the military and civilian spheres as well as the preferences of the American electorate.
by Joanna Wise
Horticultural Therapy is ideally suited to engage veterans alienated from traditional civilian healthcare routes who present with a range of complex and challenging healthcare needs. It presents, on the surface, as a deceptively simple and accessible activity. Carried out by trained professionals, it is an evidence-based, effective and cost-effective treatment. By targeting specific client-centred goals, it is able to integrate improved individual physical, emotional, cognitive and social outcomes with broader opportunities to transition successfully into civilian society through learning a valuable skill set and a meaningful occupation. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the methods of Horticultural Therapy as applied to this unique client group. It describes the type of combat training and experiences veterans may have had, and sets out the common issues and pitfalls civilian therapists often face when working with the military. Looking to the future, it also identifies promising avenues in terms of how we may improve the treatment we offer to best serve the needs of these ex-service men and women who fight on our behalf.
by
Breaking Ranks brings a new and deeply personal perspective to the war in Iraq by looking into the lives of six veterans who turned against the war they helped to fight. Based on extensive interviews with each of the six, the book relates why they enlisted, their experiences in training and in early missions, their tours of combat, and what has happened to them since returning home. The compelling stories of this diverse cross section of the military recount how each journey to Iraq began with the sincere desire to do good. Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Anne Lutz show how each individual's experiences led to new moral and political understandings and ultimately to opposing the war.
by Erin P. Finley
In this book the author relates the stories of how American veterans and their families navigate the return home. For many of the 1.6 million U.S. service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the trip home is only the beginning of a longer journey. Many undergo an awkward period of readjustment to civilian life after long deployments. Some veterans may find themselves drinking too much, unable to sleep or waking from unspeakable dreams, lashing out at friends and loved ones. Over time, some will struggle so profoundly that they eventually are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD). Following a group of veterans and their personal stories of war, trauma, and recovery, the author illustrates the devastating impact PTSD can have on veterans and their families, their loved ones, and their communities. He explores issues of substance abuse, failed relationships, domestic violence, and even suicide and also challenges popular ideas of PTSD as incurable and permanently debilitating. Drawing on ethnographic material, he examines the cultural, political, and historical influences that shape individual experiences of PTSD and how its sufferers are perceived by the military, medical personnel, and society at large. Despite widespread media coverage and public controversy over the military's response to wounded and traumatized service members, debate continues over how best to provide treatment and compensation for service-related disabilities. Meanwhile, new and highly effective treatments are revolutionizing how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides trauma care, redefining the way PTSD itself is understood in the process. Untangling each of these conflicts, the book reveals the very real implications they have for veterans living with PTSD and offers recommendations to improve how we care for this vulnerable but resilient population.
by Lisa Leitz
Fighting for Peace brings to light an important yet neglected aspect of opposition to the Iraq War-the role of veterans and their families. Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews, Lisa Leitz demonstrates how the harrowing war experiences of veterans and their families motivated a significant number of them to engage in peace activism.
by Christopher S. Parker
Fighting for Democracy shows how the experiences of African American soldiers during World War II and the Korean War influenced many of them to challenge white supremacy in the South when they returned home. Focusing on the motivations of individual black veterans, this groundbreaking book explores the relationship between military service and political activism. Christopher Parker draws on unique sources of evidence, including interviews and survey data, to illustrate how and why black servicemen who fought for their country in wartime returned to America prepared to fight for their own equal.
by Al Carroll
As far back as colonial times, Native individuals and communities have fought alongside European and American soldiers against common enemies. Medicine Bags and Dog Tags is the story of these Native men and women whose military service has defended ancient homelands, perpetuated longstanding warrior traditions, and promoted tribal survival and sovereignty.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
YOU CAN'T ASK THAT asks recent war veterans the awkward, inappropriate or uncomfortable questions you've always wanted to know the answers to, but never had the guts to ask.
by
The study of military veterans and politics has been a growing topic of interest, but to date most research on the topic has remained isolated in specific, unconnected fields of inquiry. Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics is the first multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the American veteran experience. Stephen Ortiz has compiled some of the best work on the formation and impact of veterans' policies, the politics of veterans' issues, and veterans' political engagement over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States.
by David A. Gerber
Disabled Veterans in History explores the long-neglected history of those who have sustained lasting injuries or chronic illnesses while serving in uniform. The contributors to this volume cover an impressive range of countries in Europe and North America as well as a wide sweep of chronology from the Ancient World to the present. The essays address the emergence of "veteran" as a political category with unique privileges and entitlements and of disabled veterans as a special project--and indeed one of the original projects--of the modern welfare state. The introductory essay, "Finding Disabled Veterans in History," offers perhaps the first attempt at synthesizing knowledge about disabled veterans in Western societies. The other essays examine the representation of disabled veterans from Sophocles' Philoctetes to American feature films; the relations of disabled veterans to the state and society in such public policy issues as pensions, medical care, physical rehabilitation, and job retraining; and the disabled veteran's agency and experience in reentering the peacetime world. Other topics include the place of disabled veterans in societies defeated in war; the fate of disabled veterans in societies experiencing frequent changes of political regimes; the emergence of pensions and vocational rehabilitation for disabled veterans; and the abiding problem of alcohol abuse among disabled veterans. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines, including history, physical rehabilitation, Slavic studies, sociology, communication and media, and museum studies. The book will be of interest especially to researchers in the fields of war and society, the welfare state, and disability studies, as well as those in the medical, rehabilitation, and counseling fields. David A. Gerber is Professor of History, State University at Buffalo.
by Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Filipczak
There's a serious new problem in the workplace, and it has nothing to do with downsizing, change, foreign competition, pointy-haired bosses, cubicle envy, or greed. Instead, it's the problem of distinct generations - the Veterans, the Baby Boomers, the GenXers, and (coming soon) the Nexters - crossing paths and sometimes colliding. So how can you manage this motley group with their conflicting work ethics, dissimilar values, and idiosyncratic styles? How do you get them to stop snarling at each other? How do you motivate them to work together? Generations at Work is the first book to clearly outline each group's primary characteristics, and to explain the seminal events and cultural icons that shaped their attitudes and values. But it doesn't just provide an astute sociological portrait. The book also offers practical, sound solutions for avoiding (or remedying) the most common mistakes of managing in today's cross-generational workplace.
by Suzanne Gordon
The book looks at the largest hospital system in the country, the Veterans Healthcare Administration--one that has come under fire from critics in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the nation's media. The author spent five years closely observing the VHA's treatment of patients suffering from service related injuries, physical and mental. This book describes how the VHA, tasked with a challenging patient population, does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life. It explores how the resulting public debate about the future of veterans' health care has pitted VHA patients and their care-givers against politicians and policy-makers who believe that former military personnel would be better served by private health care providers
by Aaron Glantz
The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz, who reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since, levels a devastating indictment against the Bush administration for its bald neglect of soldiers and its disingenuous reneging on their benefits.
Nightline, ABC News Productions
Overshadowed by the wars that came before and after it, the Korean War has received little of the attention it rightly deserves, yet its legacy endures: armies still face each other across the demilitarized zone - and nuclear saber-rattling, this time coming from North Korea, is still a factor. In this ABC News program, correspondent Phil Ittner embeds himself with a group of veterans making a pilgrimage to Korea for the first time since they saw action there more than 50 years ago.
by Robert Eno Hunt
Robert Hunt examines how Union veterans of the Army of the Cumberland employed the extinction of slavery in the trans-Appalachian South in their memory of the Civil War. Hunt argues that rather than ignoring or belittling emancipation, it became central to veterans' retrospective understanding of what the war, and their service in it, was all about. The Army of the Cumberland is particularly useful as a subject for this examination because it invaded the South deeply, encountering numerous ex-slaves as fugitives, refugees, laborers on military projects, and new recruits.
by James Alan Marten
After the Civil War, white Confederate and Union army veterans reentered - or struggled to reenter - the lives and communities they had left behind. In Sing Not War, James Marten explores how the nineteenth century's "Greatest Generation" attempted to blend back into society and how their experiences were treated by non-veterans. Many soldiers, Marten reveals, had a much harder time reintegrating into their communities and returning to their civilian lives than has been previously understood.
by Willamette Master Chorus
Recorded First United Methodist Church, Salem, Oregon. 2015 May 30 and June 1
by Matthew H. Bradley
by William C. Meadows
In this book, William C. Meadows presents an in-depth ethnohistorical survey of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche military societies, drawn from extensive interviews with tribal elders and military society members, unpublished archival sources, and linguistic data. He examines their structure, functions, rituals, and martial symbols, showing how they fit within larger tribal organizations. And he explores how military societies, like powwows, have become a distinct public format for cultural and ethnic continuity.
Every year, children and adults alike take to the streets dressed as witches, demons, animals, celebrities, and more. They carve pumpkins and play pranks, and the braver ones watch scary movies and go on ghost tours. There are parades, fireworks displays, cornfield mazes, and haunted houses--and, most important, copious amounts of bite-sized candy. The popularity of Halloween has spread around the globe to places as diverse as Russia, China, and Japan, but its association with death and the supernatural and its inevitable commercialization has made it one of our most misunderstood holidays. How did it become what it is today? In Trick or Treat, Halloween aficionado Lisa Morton provides a thorough history of this spooky day. She begins by looking at how holidays like the Celtic Samhain, a Gaelic harvest festival, have blended with the British Guy Fawkes Day and the Catholic All Souls' Day to produce the modern Halloween, and she explains how the holiday was reborn in America, where costumes and trick-or-treat rituals have become new customs. Morton takes into account the influence of related but independent holidays, especially the Mexican Day of the Dead, as well as the explosion in popularity of haunted attractions and the impact of such events as 9/11 and the economic recession on the celebration today. Trick or Treat also examines the effect Halloween has had on popular culture through the literary works of Washington Irving and Ray Bradbury, films like Halloween and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Simpsons. Considering the holiday in the context of its worldwide popularity for the first time, this book will be a treat for any Halloween lover.
Boasting a rich, complex history rooted in Celtic and Christian ritual, Halloween has evolved from ethnic celebration to a blend of street festival, fright night, and vast commercial enterprise. In this colorful history, Nicholas Rogers takes a lively, entertaining look at the cultural originsand development of one of the most popular holidays of the year.Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, from classical history to Hollywood films, Rogers traces Halloween as it emerged from the Celtic festival of Samhain (summer's end), picked up elements of the Christian Hallowtide (All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day), arrived in North America as anIrish and Scottish festival, and evolved into an unofficial but large-scale holiday by the early 20th century. He examines the 1970s and '80s phenomena of Halloween sadism (razor blades in apples) and inner-city violence (arson in Detroit), as well as the immense influence of the horror film genreon the reinvention of Halloween as a terror-fest. Throughout his vivid account, Rogers shows how Halloween remains, at its core, a night of inversion, when social norms are turned upside down, and a temporary freedom of expression reigns supreme. He examines how this very license has promptedcensure by the religious Right, occasional outrage from law enforcement officials, and appropriation by Left-leaning political groups.Engagingly written and based on extensive research, Halloween is the definitive history of the most bewitching day of the year, illuminating the intricate history and shifting cultural forces behind this enduring trick-or-treat holiday.
Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre. Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time. Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over fifty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
Salem, Massachusetts, 1692.In a plain meetinghouse, a woman stands before her judges. The accusers, girls and young women, are fervent, overexcited, just on the edge of breaking out into convulsions. The accused is a poor, unpopular woman who had her first child before she was married. As the trial proceeds, the girls begin to wail, tear their clothing, and scream that the woman is hurting them. Some of them expose wounds to the horrified onlookers, holding out the pins that have stabbed them -- pins that have appeared as if by magic. Are the girls acting, or are they really tormented by an unseen evil? Whatever the cause, the nightmare in Salem has begun: The witch trials will eventually claim twenty-five lives, shatter the community, and forever shape the American social conscience.Acclaimed historian Marc Aronson sifts through the facts, myths, half-truths, misinterpretations, and theories around the Salem witch trials to present us with a vivid narrative of one of the most compelling mysteries in American history.Witch-Huntis a brilliant book that will stimulate and challenge readers to come to their own conclusions about what really happened during those terrifying months of accusations, trials, and executions.
Sure to capture the imagination of devotees of true crime and the occult This anthology of thirteen true crime stories includes the mysterious slaying of Charles Walton, who was found slashed and pierced to death in an area notorious for its associations with black magic; the murder of Eric Tombe, whose body was located because of a recurring dream in which his mother saw Eric down a well; the terrorizing of Hammersmith, London, in the early nineteenth century by the nocturnal appearance of a "ghost"; the Salem witchcraft trials; the murder of Rasputin, who was believed by some in Russia to be a miracle worker and by others to be a dangerous charlatan; a Scottish tale in which evidence given by the ghost of the victim was allowed at the murderer's trial; and the bizarre goings-on at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York, where Ronnie DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family--the new occupants were subjected to all manner of sinister events, including the presence of poltergeists, or were they?
With a thorough and systematic review of investigations into the bases of belief in paranormal phenomena, this discussion explores the four main theoretical approaches relating to the nature of such beliefs. Objective and well-researched, this account addresses different points of view on the topic--while some commentators depict paranormal believers as foolish, others propose that paranormal beliefs must be understood as necessities that serve certain psychodynamic needs. The foundations and shortcomings of each approach are also documented, and a new comprehensive theory attempts to explain the development of scientifically unsubstantiated beliefs.
While we live in a technologically and scientifically advanced age, superstition is as widespread as ever. Not limited to just athletes and actors, superstitious beliefs are common among people of all occupations, educational backgrounds, and income levels.In this fully updated edition of Believing in Magic, renowned superstition expert Stuart Vyse investigates our tendency towards these irrational beliefs. Superstitions, he writes, are the natural result of several psychological processes, including our human sensitivity to coincidence, a penchant for developing rituals to fill time (to battle nerves, impatience, or both), our efforts to cope with uncertainty, the need for control, and more. In a new Introduction, Vyse discusses important developments and the latest research on jinxes, paranormal beliefs, and luck. He also distinguishes superstition from paranormal and religious beliefs and identifies the potential benefits of superstition for believers. He examines the research to demonstrate how we can better understand complex human behavior. Although superstition is a normal part of our culture, Vyse argues that we must provide alternative methods of coping with life's uncertainties by teaching decision analysis, promoting science education, and challenging ourselves to critically evaluate the sources of our beliefs.
Don't get in that car without looking in the back seat! Everyone has heard the story about such-and-such, and while it sounds impossible, so-and-so swears that it must be true. Often gory, disgusting, shocking, and surprising, urban legends are central to everyday experience. From high schools and colleges to offices and organizations, urban legends are everywhere. This book collects more than 150 urban legends from around the world, such as The Mutilated Shopper, The Devil at the Disco, and The Thug in the Back Seat. The tales are grouped in thematic chapters, and each entry includes an introductory discussion of the legend and its presence in popular culture, the text of the legend, suggestions for further reading, and cross-references to similar tales. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography and a detailed index. Literature students will welcome the opportunity to read and write about these legends, social studies students will value them as a reflection of contemporary culture, and general readers will enjoy browsing them and learning more about their background and significance. Don't pick up that hitchhiker! Don't get in that car without looking in the back seat! If you knew what they put in that, no way would you eat it! Urban legends are central to everyday experience. Everyone has heard the story about such-and-such, and while it sounds impossible, so-and-so swears that it must be true. These legends are everywhere, from high schools and colleges to offices and organizations. They appear in films, television series, and novels, and are now widely spread over the Internet. This book collects and annotates more than 150 urban legends from around the world and is a valuable resource for students, general readers, and anyone interested in contemporary culture. Each entry provides introductory information about a legend, including its presence in films and other creative works; the text of the legend; a list of works for further reading; and references to similar tales. The legends are grouped in thematic chapters, such as animals, city life, and horror. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography and a detailed index. Students of literature will enjoy studying and analyzing these tales, while students in social studies courses will welcome them as a reflection of contemporary concerns.
As a former private investigator and forensic writer, Joe Nickell has spent much of his career identifying forged documents, working undercover to infiltrate theft rings, and investigating questioned deaths. Now he turns his considerable investigative skill toward the paranormal, researching the most well-known and mysterious phenomena all over the world -- spontaneous human combustion, UFO visitations, auras, electronic poltergeists, and many, many more -- with an eye toward solving these mysteries rather than promoting or dismissing them. Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal examines the cases of over forty paranormal mysteries. Using a hands-on approach, Nickell visits the scene of the so-called unexplainable activity whenever possible and attempts to physically duplicate the miraculous. Whether he's inflicting stigmata on himself or recreating the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius, Nickell does whatever necessary to eliminate the probable before considering the supernatural. What is left is that much more fascinating. Nickell reports on familiar legends from American history such as the supernatural events surrounding Abraham Lincoln's death and the supposed crash landing of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico. He closely examines claims of the miraculous, from rose petals bearing the likeness of Jesus to photographs of a "golden door" to heaven. Controversial mysteries such as clairvoyance and "spirit painting," haunted places, and freaks of nature are just a few of the many topics covered. Suspenseful, engrossing, funny, and grounded in scientific methodology, Real-Life X-Files provides real explanations for the "paranormal" activities that have intrigued human beings for centuries.
Tells the stories of some of the most intriguing cases of paranormal activity in the public record, introducing some of the people who seem to have psychic abilities, and discussing prophecies, ghosts, medical mysteries, and other unexplained phenomena.
From Jack the Ripper to Frankenstein, Halloween customs to Alexander McQueen collections, Fashioning Horror examines how terror is fashioned visually, symbolically, and materially through fashion and costume, in literature, film, and real life. With a series of case studies that range from sensationalist cinema and Slasher films to true crime and nineteenth-century literature, the volume investigates the central importance of clothing to the horror genre, and broadens our understanding of both material and popular culture. Arguing that dress is fundamental to our understanding of character and setting within horror, the chapters also reveal how the grotesque and horrific is at the center of fashion itself, with its potential for instability, disguise, and carnivalesque subversion. Packed with original research, and bringing together a range of international scholars, the book is the first to thoroughly examine the aesthetics of terror and the role of fashion in the construction of horror.
This book is a major historical and cultural overview of an increasingly popular genre. Starting with the cultural phenomenon of Godzilla, it explores the evolution of Japanese horror from the 1950s through to contemporary classics of Japanese horror cinema such as Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. Divided thematically, the book explores key motifs such as the vengeful virgin, the demonic child, the doomed lovers and the supernatural serial killer, situating them within traditional Japanese mythology and folk-tales. The book also considers the aesthetics of the Japanese horror film, and the mechanisms through which horror is expressed at a visceral level through the use of setting, lighting, music and mise-en-scene. It concludes by considering the impact of Japanese horror on contemporary American cinema by examining the remakes of Ringu, Dark Water and Ju-On: The Grudge.The emphasis is on accessibility, and whilst the book is primarily marketed towards film and media students, it will also be of interest to anyone interested in Japanese horror film, cultural mythology and folk-tales, cinematic aesthetics and film theory.Key Features:*Covers classics of Japanese horror film such as Pitfall, Tales of Ugetsu, Kwaidan, Onibaba, Hellish Love and Empire of Desire alongside less well-known cult films such as Pulse, St John's Wort, Infection and Living Hell: A Japanese Chainsaw Massacre.*Includes analysis of the relationship between cultural mythology and the horror film.*Explores the evolution of the erotic ghost story in the 1960s and 1970s.*Examines the contemporary relationship between Japanese horror film and American horror.*Contains 9 B&W film stills.
In its heyday from the late 1950s until the early 1980s Italian horror cinema was characterised by an excess of gore, violence and often incoherent plot-lines. Films about zombies, cannibals and psychopathic killers ensured there was no shortage of controversy, and the genre presents a seemingly unpromising nexus of films for sustained critical analysis. But Italian horror cinema with all its variations, subgenres and filoni remains one of the most recognisable and iconic genre productions in Europe, achieving cult status worldwide. One of the manifestations of a rich production landscape in Italian popular cinema after the Second World War, Italian horror was also characterised by its imitation of foreign models and the transnational dimension of its production agreements, as well as by its international locations and stars. This collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new understanding of the genre, investigating the different phases in its history, the peculiarities of the production system, the work of its most representative directors (Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and the wider role it has played within popular culture.
Spanish Horror Film is the first in-depth exploration of the genre in Spain from the 'horror boom' of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the most recent production in the current renaissance of Spanish genre cinema, through a study of its production, circulation, regulation and consumption. The examination of this rich cinematic tradition is firmly located in relation to broader historical and cultural shifts in recent Spanish history and as an important part of the European horror film tradition and the global culture of psychotronia. Key Features The first critical study on Spanish horror film to be published in English. An overview of key directors, cycles and representative films as well as of more obscure and neglected horror production. A detailed analysis of the work of directors such as JesÃðs Franco, Amando de Ossorio, Narciso IbÃŁÃłez Serrador, Eloy de la Iglesia, Jaume BalaguerÃđ, Nacho CerdÃŁ and Guillermo del Toro's Spanish" films. A focus on critical and cult contexts of reception in Spain, Great Britain and USA.
Illus. in black-and-white. With an extraordinary gift for suspense, McKissack brings us ten original spine-tingling tales inspired by African-American historyandthe mystery of that eerie half-hour before nightfall--the dark thirty. "The atmosphere of each selection is skillfully developed and sustained to the very end. Pinkney's stark scratchboard illustrations evoke an eerie mood, which heightens the suspense of each tale. This is a stellar collection for both public and school libraries looking for absorbing books to hook young readers. Storytellers will also find it a goldmine."--(starred)School Library Journal.
This spooky addition to Alvin Schwartz's popular books on American folklore is filled with tales of eerie horror and dark revenge that will make you jump with fright. There is a story here for everyone -- skeletons with torn and tangled flesh who roam the earth; a ghost who takes revenge on her murderer; and a haunted house where every night a bloody head falls down the chimney. Stephen Gammell's splendidly creepy drawings perfectly capture the mood of more than two dozen scary stories -- and even scary songs -- all just right for reading alone or for telling aloud in the dark. If You Dare
The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring.... In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own. Only it's different. At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go. Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself. Critically acclaimed and award-winning author Neil Gaiman will delight readers with his first novel for all ages.
Discover the Newbery Honor winner Doll Bones, from Holly Black, the cocreator of the Spiderwick Chronicles. A Kirkus Reviews Best Book. A School Library Journal Best Book. A Booklist Editor's Choice Books for Youth. A Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book. A NYPL "100 Titles for Reading and Sharing." A 2013 Goodreads Choice award nominee. A People Magazine "Best New Kids Book." Six starred reviews! Winner of a 2014 Newbery Honor Medal. Zach, Poppy, and Alice have been friends forever. And for almost as long, they've been playing one continuous, ever-changing game of pirates and thieves, mermaids and warriors. Ruling over all is the Great Queen, a bone-china doll cursing those who displease her. But they are in middle school now. Zach's father pushes him to give up make-believe, and Zach quits the game. Their friendship might be over, until Poppy declares she's been having dreams about the Queen--and the ghost of a girl who will not rest until the bone-china doll is buried in her empty grave. Zach and Alice and Poppy set off on one last adventure to lay the Queen's ghost to rest. But nothing goes according to plan, and as their adventure turns into an epic journey, creepy things begin to happen. Is the doll just a doll or something more sinister? And if there really is a ghost, will it let them go now that it has them in its clutches? Doll Bones is a winner of the Newbery Honor, is the recipient of six starred reviews, was on four Best Book lists, and was called "perfect" by The New York Times.
Bloodier than "Fried Green Tomatoes" Funnier than "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" Welcome to Gil's All Night Diner, where zombie attacks are a regular occurrence and you never know what might be lurking in the freezer . . . Duke and Earl are just passing through Rockwood county in their pick-up truck when they stop at the Diner for a quick bite to eat. They aren't planning to stick around-until Loretta, the eatery's owner, offers them $100 to take care of her zombie problem. Given that Duke is a werewolf and Earl's a vampire, this looks right up their alley. But the shambling dead are just the tip of a particularly spiky iceberg. Seems someone's out to drive Loretta from the Diner, and more than willing to raise a little Hell on Earth if that's what it takes. Before Duke and Earl get to the bottom of the Diner's troubles, they'll run into such otherworldly complications as undead cattle, an amorous ghost, a jailbait sorceress, and the terrifying occult power of pig-latin. And maybe--just maybe--the End of the World, too. Gory, sexy, and flat-out hilarious, "Gil's All Fright Diner" will tickle your funnybone--before ripping it out of its socket
Genderqueer fourteen-year-old Z Chilworth has to adjust quickly to their new status as a zombie after waking from death from a car crash that killed their parents and sisters. Always a talented witch, Z now can barely perform magic and is rapidly decaying. Faced with rejection from their remaining family members and old friends, Z moves in with Mrs. Dunnigan, an elderly witch and befriends Aysel, a loud would-be-goth classmate who is, like Z, a loner. As Z struggles to find a way to repair the broken magical seal holding their body together, Aysel fears that her classmates will discover her status as an unregistered werewolf. When a local psychiatrist is murdered by what seems to be werewolves, the town of Salem, Oregon, becomes even more hostile to "monsters," and Z and Aysel are driven together in an attempt to survive a place where most people wish that neither of them existed. Rarely has a first-time author created characters of such immediacy and power as Z, Aysel, Tommy (suspected fey) and Elaine (also a werewolf), or a world that parallels our own so clearly and disturbingly.
The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers--and soon it will choose one of them to make its own. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions. Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books.
This writer's guide explains how to write short stories and horror fiction for children and adults. The author shows how to build on the initial idea and develop characters and plot. There are ideas for selecting and approaching publishers and information about contracts and publication.
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.
"If you've ever wondered if love can conquer all, read [this] stunning coming-of-age debut." --Marie Claire ANew York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR *BuzzFeed * Bustle * Shelf Awareness * Publishers Lunch "[This] love story has hypnotic power."--The New Yorker Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does. Born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. But when their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself--and there is a cost to living inside a lie. Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Chinelo Okparanta shows us, in "graceful and precise" prose (New York Times Book Review), how the struggles and divisions of a nation are inscribed on the souls of its citizens. "Powerful and heartbreaking,Under the Udala Trees is a deeply moving commentary on identity, prejudice, and forbidden love" (BuzzFeed). "An important and timely read, imbued with both political ferocity and mythic beauty."--Bustle "A real talent. [Under the Udala Trees is] the kind of book that should have come with a cold compress kit. It's sad and sensual and full of heat." -- John Freeman,Electric Literature "Demands not just to be read, but felt." -- Edwidge Danticat
The acclaimed book behind the 2018 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning movie "LGBTQ cinema is out in force at Sundance Film Festival," proclaimed USA Today. "The acerbic coming-of-age movie is adapted from Emily M. Danforth's novel, and stars Chloë Grace Moretz as a lesbian teen who is sent to a gay conversion therapy center after she gets caught having sex with her friend on prom night." The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a stunning and provocative literary debut that was named to numerous best of the year lists. When Cameron Post's parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they'll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone, and Cam becomes an expert at both. Then Coley Talor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship, one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to "fix" her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self--even if she's not quite sure who that is. Don't miss this raw and powerful own voices debut, the basis for the award-winning film starring Chloë Grace Moretz.
A 2015 Stonewall Honor Book A groundbreaking work of LGBT literature takes an honest look at the life, love, and struggles of transgender teens. Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages, augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender, and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves.
Two award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author join forces for a collaborative novel of awesome proportions. One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two teens--both named Will Grayson--are about to cross paths. As their worlds collide and intertwine, the Will Graysons find their lives going in new and unexpected directions, building toward romantic turns-of-heart and the epic production of history's most fabulous high school musical. Hilarious, poignant, and deeply insightful, John Green and David Levithan's collaborative novel is brimming with a double helping of the heart and humor that have won them both legions of faithful fans. A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice An ALA Stonewall Honor Book "Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a complete romp. [It is] so funny, rude and original that by the time flowers hit the stage, even the musical-averse will cheer." --The New York Times Book Review ★"Will have readers simultaneously laughing, crying and singing at the top of their lungs."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review "It is such a good book. [Green and Levithan] are two of the best writers writing today." --NPR'sThe Roundtable
Exploring cultural expressions of Puerto Rican queer migration from the Caribbean to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes analyzes how artists have portrayed their lives and the discrimination they have faced in both Puerto Rico and the United States. Highlighting cultural and political resistance within Puerto Rico's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender subcultures, La Fountain-Stokes pays close attention to differences of gender, historical moment, and generation, arguing that Puerto Rican queer identity changes over time and is experienced in very different ways. He traces an arc from 1960s Puerto Rico and the writings of Luis Rafael Sánchez to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s (Manuel Ramos Otero), Philadelphia and New Jersey in the 1980s and 1990s (Luz María Umpierre and Frances Negrón-Muntaner), and Chicago (Rose Troche) and San Francisco (Erika López) in the 1990s, culminating with a discussion of Arthur Avilés and Elizabeth Marrero's recent dance-theater work in the Bronx. Proposing a radical new conceptualization of Puerto Rican migration, this work reveals how sexuality has shaped and defined the Puerto Rican experience in the United States.
Milestones of gay and lesbian life in the United States are brought together in the first-ever nonfiction book published specifically for teens. Profusely illustrated with archival images, the groundbreaking Gay America reveals how gay men and women have lived, worked, and loved for the past 125 years. Gays and lesbians play a very prominent role in American life today, whether grabbing headlines over political gains, starring in and being the subject of movies and television shows, or filling the streets of nearly every major city each year to celebrate Gay Pride. However, this was not always the case, and this book charts their journey along with the history of the country. First touching on colonial times, the book moves on to the Victorian period and beyond, including such historical milestones as the Roaring ’20s, the Kinsey study, the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, the Beat generation, Stonewall, disco, AIDS, and present-day battles over gay marriage. Providing a sense of hope mixed with pride, author Linas Alsenas demonstrates how, within one century, gay women and men have gone from being socially invisible to becoming a political force to be reckoned with and proud members of the American public living openly and honestly. The book includes a bibliography and an index.
Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.
Long Before Stonewall seeks to uncover the many iterations of same-sex desire in colonial America and the early Republic, as well as to expand the scope of how we define and recognize homosocial behavior. Thomas A. Foster has assembled a pathbreaking, interdisciplinary collection of original and classic essays that explore topics ranging from homoerotic imagery of black men to prison reform to the development of sexual orientations. This collection spans a regional and temporal breadth that stretches from the colonial Southwest to Quaker communities in New England. It also includes a challenge to commonly accepted understandings of the Native American berdache. Throughout, connections of race, class, status, and gender are emphasized, exposing the deep foundations on which modern sexual political movements and identities are built.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book's focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of "the closet" and "coming out" and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as "isolated" and in need of "outreach." Contributors focus on a range of topics--some obvious, some delightfully unexpected--from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.
LGBTQ STATS chronicles the ongoing LGBTQ revolution, providing critical statistics, and draws upon and synthesizes newly collected data. Deschamps and Singer provide chapters on family and marriage, workplace discrimination, education, youth, criminal justice, and immigration, as well as evolving policies and laws affecting LGBTQ communities. A lively, accessible, and eye-opening snapshot, LGBTQ STATS offers an invaluable resource for activists, journalists, lawmakers, and general readers who want the facts and figures on LGBTQ lives in the twenty-first century.
The award-winning novel about being out, being proud, and being ready for something else. Pre-order the companion novel Honestly Ben now (out 3/28/17)! Rafe is a normal teenager from Boulder, Colorado. He plays soccer. He's won skiing prizes. He likes to write. And, oh yeah, he's gay. He's been out since 8th grade, and he isn't teased, and he goes to other high schools and talks about tolerance and stuff. And while that's important, all Rafe really wants is to just be a regular guy. Not that GAY guy. To have it be a part of who he is, but not the headline, every single time. So when he transfers to an all-boys' boarding school in New England, he decides to keep his sexuality a secret -- not so much going back in the closet as starting over with a clean slate. But then he sees a classmate breaking down. He meets a teacher who challenges him to write his story. And most of all, he falls in love with Ben... who doesn't even know that love is possible.
The editors provide a thought-provoking resource for anyone concerned with sexuality and gender identity in health and social care settings. Drawing on current research and debates, the contributors explore some of the tensions between the different ways in which sexuality is understood and experienced. A focus of the book is on how categories like 'lesbian', 'gay', 'bisexual', and 'trans' shape everyday practice and service use. It looks at the circumstances in which people choose to describe themselves with these identity labels and the situations in which they reject or feel constrained by them. A particular feature of the book is its combination of a nuanced understanding of the nature of sexual identities with practice-relevant and grounded examples taken from health and social care settings, with a Scottish focus. Intended primarily for a practitioner audience and for those studying in the field of health and social care this volume will also interest academics and an international audience because of its distinctive theoretical sophistication about the nature of sexual identities.
For two years, Philip Gambone traveled the length and breadth of the United States, talking candidly with LGBTQ people about their lives. In addition to interviews from David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, Travels in a Gay Nation brings us lesser-known voices--a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and "drag king," a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who happen to be lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay frat house, and a pair of Vermont garden designers. In this age when contemporary gay America is still coming under attack, Gambone captures the humanity of each individual. For some, their identity as a sexual minority is crucial to their life's work; for others, it has been less so, perhaps even irrelevant. But, whether splashy or quiet, center-stage or behind the scenes, Gambone's subjects have managed--despite facing ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance, injustice, violence, ridicule, or just plain indifference--to construct passionate, inspiring lives. Finalist, Foreword Magazine's Anthology of the Year Outstanding Book in the High School Category, selected by the American Association of School Libraries Best Book in Special Interest Category, selected by the Public Library Association
Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city's beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago's LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Included here are Jane Addams, the pioneer of American social work; blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded "Sissy Blues" in Chicago in 1926; commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for "The Arrow Collar Man" advertisements; and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen's ♣ the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of "physique magazines"; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels. Chicago Whispers offers a diverse collection of alternately hip and heart-wrenching accounts that crackle with vitality.
Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss. This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.
LGBTQ Issues in Education: Advancing a Research Agenda examines the current state of the knowledge on LGBTQ issues in education and addresses future research directions. The editor and authors draw on existing literature, theories, and data as they synthesize key areas of research. Readers studying LGBTQ issues or working on adjacent topics will find the book to be an invaluable tool as it sets forth major findings and recommendations for additional research. Equally important, the book brings to light the importance of investing in research and data on a topic of critical educational and social significance.
"This important and accessible book about the evolving treatment of LGBTQ athletes in organized sports should be required reading for anyone involved in the playing, coaching, and administration of organized sports. Zeigler, an expert in LGBTQ athletics and cofounder of the online magazine Outsports, revisits key moments that have shaped sports participation for openly LGBTQ athletes....The author debunks the myth that having a nonstraight athlete on a team’s roster is a ''distraction'' and shares positive stories of younger athletes at high school and college levels who have come out to coaches, teammates, and family members. Zeigler argues that the dominant emotion holding back LGBTQ athletes is fear, reminding them and everyone else that courage is contagious." --Publishers Weekly "Outsports.com founder Zeigler gives an account of the great strides LGBTQ athletes have made in the sports world over the last 15 years...Lively and provocative, the book not only offers a much-needed perspective on what until recently has been one of the last bastions of heterosexism. It is also significant for its conscious consideration of how current developments will impact LGBTQ athletes of tomorrow.
Ten years after its original publication, Roman Homosexuality remains the definitive statement of this interesting but often misunderstood aspect of Roman culture. Learned yet accessible, the book has reached both students and general readers with an interest in ancient sexuality. This second edition features a new foreword by Martha Nussbaum, a completely rewritten introduction that takes account of new developments in the field, a rewritten and expanded appendix on ancient images of sexuality, and an updated bibliography.
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice take centre stage in Queering the Shakespeare Film. This study critiques the various representations of the queer - broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant, particularly - but not exclusively - as regards sexual matters, in the Shakespeare film. The movies chosen for analysis correspond deliberately with those Shakespeare plays that, as written texts, have been subjected to a great deal of productive study in a queer context since the beginnings of queer theory in the early 1990s. Thus the book extends the ongoing queer discussion of these written texts to their counterpart cinematic texts. Queering the Shakespeare Film is a much-needed alternative and complementary critical history of the Shakespeare film genre.
In this groundbreaking book, thirty authors highlight how our experiences are shaped by a deeply entrenched gender binary. Nuanced storytellers break away from mainstream portrayals of gender diversity, cutting across lines of age, race, ethnicity, ability, class, religion, family, and relationships.
Three decades after the Sexual Revolution, women's power and status have begun to match men's, and women are finally making the rules in order to experience a more radical and truer form of liberation.
Her Way demonstrates how and why 20- and 30-something women have evolved to act and think more like men sexually, while also creating their own distinct sexual patterns and appetites. Today's young women are now the leaders of an unreported but sweeping "Sexual Evolution," in which women take control of sex and redefine it from their perspective. In other words, do it "her way."
Throughout their relatively short history, lesbian and gay movements in the United States have endured searing conflicts over whether to embrace assimilationist or liberationist strategies. The Lesbian and Gay Movements explores this dilemma in both contemporary and historical contexts. Rimmerman tackles the challenging issue of what constitutes movement "effectiveness" and how "effective" the assimilationist and liberationist strategies have been in three contentious policy arenas: the military ban, same-sex marriage, and AIDS. Since the first edition in 2007, the landscape of lesbian and gay movements and rights has seen enormous changes. The thoroughly revised second edition includes updated discussion of LGBT movements' undertakings in, as well the Obama administration’s response to, HIV/AIDS policy, the fight to legalize same-sex marriage and overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, and the repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell."
This book examines the growing transgender rights movement and the issues surrounding the transgender community. Discussion of topics related to increased legal protection, military service, and the many ethical as well as financial issues surrounding health care. It includes primary and secondary sources from a variety of perspectives; eyewitnesses, scientific journals, government officials, and many others. An extensive bibliography and annotated list of relevant organizations to contact offer a gateway to future research.
Even as substantial legal and social victories are being celebrated within the gay rights movement, much of working-class America still exists outside the current narratives of gay liberation. In Steel Closets, Anne Balay draws on oral history interviews with forty gay, lesbian, and transgender steelworkers, mostly living in northwestern Indiana, to give voice to this previously silent and invisible population. She presents powerful stories of the intersections of work, class, gender, and sexual identity in the dangerous industrial setting of the steel mill. The voices and stories captured by Balay--by turns alarming, heroic, funny, and devastating--challenge contemporary understandings of what it means to be queer and shed light on the incredible homophobia and violence faced by many: nearly all of Balay's narrators remain closeted at work, and many have experienced harassment, violence, or rape. Through the powerful voices of queer steelworkers themselves, Steel Closets provides rich insight into an understudied part of the LGBT population, contributing to a growing body of scholarship that aims to reveal and analyze a broader range of gay life in America.
How do gay and lesbian teachers negotiate their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even as mutually opposed? Using interviews and other ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell's examination of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers complicating factors, from local law and politics to gender privilege. She also describes how racialized discourses of homophobia thwart challenges to sexual injustices in schools. Written with ethnographic verve, School's Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics.
Reclaiming Queer is an examination of the rhetorical linkage of queer theory in the academy with street-level queer activism in the 1980s and early 1990s. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a defining historical moment for both queer activism and queer theory in the United States. LGBT communities, confronted with the alarming violence and homophobia of the AIDS crisis, often responded with angry, militant forms of activism designed not merely to promote acceptance or tolerance, but to forge identity and strength from victimization and assert loudly and forcefully their rights to safety and humanity. The activist reclamation of the word "queer" is one marker of this shift in ideology and practice, and it was mirrored in academic circles by the concurrent emergence of the new field of "queer theory."
A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery."A Two-Spirit Journey" is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby's story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.
For too long, LGBTQ communities—including Minnesota’s—have been maligned, misrepresented, and often outright ignored. Myths regarding the queer experience have grown and become embedded in local and national consciousness. The absence of queer stories over time in local historical and popular writing only served to further this ignorance, but great strides have been made in recent decades to celebrate Minnesota’s vibrant queer history. Add to this rising chorus an enchanting new voice: Land of 10,000 Loves, Stewart Van Cleve’s wide-ranging and unprecedented illustrated history of queer life in Minnesota.
Amid the hype of Race to the Top, online experiments such as Khan Academy, and bestselling books like The Sandbox Investment, we seem to have drawn a line that leads from nursery school along a purely economic route, with money as the final stop. But what price do we all pay for the increasingly singular focus on wage as the outcome of education? Susan Engel, a leading psychologist and educator, argues that this economic framework has had a profound impact not only on the way we think about education but also on what happens inside school buildings. The End of the Rainbow asks what would happen if we changed the implicit goal of education and imagines how different things would be if we made happiness, rather than money, the graduation prize. Drawing on psychology, education theory, and a broad range of classroom experiences across the country, Engel offers a fascinating alternative view of what education might become: teaching children to read books for pleasure and self-expansion and encouraging collaboration. All of these new skills, she argues, would not only cultivate future success in the world of work but also would make society as a whole a better, happier place. Accessible to parents and teachers alike, The End of the Rainbow will be the beginning of a new, more vibrant public conversation about what the future of American education should look like.
Living Recovery provides critical information for practitioners and educators in mental health services about the self-described needs of young people diagnosed with mental illness. It portrays the stages of living with mental illness through the recovery model emergence, loss, adaptation, and recovery. The author interviewed youth aged sixteen to twenty-seven in Canada, Australia, and the US, and her book relates the price of the stigma surrounding mental illness, especially for young people who are already challenged with the developmental tasks of adolescence. The text examines the youth-described social illness of stigma and the resulting self-marginalization they say is necessary to survive stigma and social isolation. When youth feel isolated, ignored, or shunned, the resulting shame and stress they may feel has the potential to exacerbate such illnesses as obsessive compulsive disorder, psychosis, anxiety, and/or various mood disorders. The findings from this research anticipate and identify interventions that are useful for youth with mental illness. If programs and systems of care take into account youth stories such as those presented here, interventions will become more meaningful and more likely to address problems related to social and emotional distresses. In charting journeys through the emergence of illness, to loss, adaptation, and recovery, the book reports on how mental illness disrupted these youths lives on every level, especially in the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood. But youth also describe ways in which they adapted and recovered and how they came to own the illness with a greater sense of agency and self-direction.
In spite of their tragic nature, and notwithstanding the human suffering they create, emergency situations are also opportunities to build better mental health care. The surge of aid, combined with sudden, focused attention on the mental health of the population, creates unparalleled opportunities to transform mental health care for the long term. By publishing this information, the World Health Organization ensures that those faced with emergencies do not miss the opportunity for mental health reform. Emergencies are not only mental health tragedies, but also powerful catalysts for achieving sustainable mental health care in affected communities. We do not know where the next major emergency will be, but we do know that those affected will have the opportunity to build back better. Reading this publication is an excellent way to prepare for and respond to that eventuality. The ten cases that form the core of this report show how it can be done. Early commitment towards a longer-term perspective for mental health reform is key to success. The report summarizes lessons learned and key overlapping practices emerging from these experiences.
"In their book First Person Accounts of Mental Illness and Recovery, LeCroy and Holschuh offer the student, researcher, or layperson the intimate voice of mental illness from the inside. First Person Accounts of Mental Illness and Recovery is a wonderful book, and it is an ideal, even indispensable, companion to traditional mental health texts. I am grateful that they have given the majority of this book to the voices that are too often unheard." --John S. Brekke, PhD, Frances G. Larson Professor of Social Work Research, School of Social Work, University of Southern California; Fellow, American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare "This is absolutely a must-read for anyone who has been touched by someone with a mental illness, whether it be personal or professional. It is imperative that this book be required reading in any course dealing with psychopathology and the DSM, whether it be in psychology, psychiatry, social work, nursing, or counseling." --Phyllis Solomon, PhD, Professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice and Professor of Social Work in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania A unique volume of first person narratives written from the perspective of individuals with a mental illness. Drawing from a broad range of sources, including narratives written expressly for this book, self-published accounts, and excerpts from previously published memoirs, this distinctive set of personal stories covers and illustrates a wide spectrum of mental disorder categories, including: Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders Mood disorders Anxiety disorders Personality disorders Substance-related disorders Eating disorders Impulse control disorders Cognitive disorders Somatoform disorders Dissociative disorders Gender identity disorders Sleep disorders Disorders usually first diagnosed in infancy, childhood, or adolescence.
Written in a lively and entertaining style, Facts and Fictions in Mental Health examines common conceptions and misconceptions surrounding mental health and its treatment. Each chapter focuses on a misconception and is followed by a discussion of related findings from scientific research. A compilation of the authors' "Facts and Fictions" columns written for Scientific American Mind, with the addition of six new columns exclusive to this book Written in a lively and often entertaining style, accessible to both the undergraduate and the interested general reader Each chapter covers a different "fiction" and allows readers to gain a more balanced and accurate view of important topics in mental health The six new columns examine myths and misconceptions of considerable interest and relevance to undergraduates in abnormal psychology courses Introductory material and references are included throughout the book
What makes people happy? Why should governments care about people's well-being? How would policy change if well-being were the main objective? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a uniquely comprehensive range of evidence from longitudinal data on over one hundred thousand individuals in Britain, the United States, Australia, and Germany, the authors consider the key factors that affect human well-being. The authors explore factors such as income, education, employment, family conflict, health, childcare, and crime--and their findings are not what we might expect. Contrary to received wisdom, income inequality accounts for only two percent or less of the variance in happiness across the population; the critical factors affecting a person's happiness are their relationships and their mental and physical health. More people are in misery due to mental illness than to poverty, unemployment, or physical illness. Examining how childhood influences happiness in adulthood, the authors show that academic performance is a less important predictor than emotional health and behavior, which is shaped tremendously by schools, individual teachers, and parents. For policymakers, the authors propose new forms of cost-effectiveness analysis that places well-being at center stage. Groundbreaking in its scope and results, The Origins of Happiness offers all of us a new vision for how we might become more healthy, happy, and whole.
Much has been written about cognitive development in those who are cognitively impaired. Much is written about attachment for people who don't have disabilities. Yet people with disabilities have suffered discrimination and neglect of their emotional needs, perhaps because the pain of difference cannot be tolerated, perhaps because of lack of will or lack of knowledge. This book aims to help to fill the knowledge gap and to encourage others to overcome their resistance to facing the pain, and will be an important contribution to our understanding of the world of disability and emotional deprivation.In this book - a result of over twenty years experience with people who have disabilities and additional distress as a result of traumatic life experiences - an attempt is made to bring together what we know about early emotional development and the consequences of failure to provide an emotionally nurturing experience, and the results are then applied to people with disabilities. There are ways of working that help, and when appropriately targeted, make a huge difference to some very complex and distressed lives, and the evidence points to the possibility of effective interventions to correct the damage, and that with the correct intervention, individuals can be saved from incarceration in secure units, for example, and have a much improved quality of life.
"This text provides a comprehensive overview, if not thesis, of the contributing factors to workplace stress and how to revisit them] and our own mental health. How can nurses and health care workplaces expect to offer health and healing when such basic foundational human dynamics of mental health are not addressed? This work opens the door to both the dynamics and the deep dimensions of the root issues facing humanity and our places of work and play." - Jean Watson, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN. "This is a wonderful addition to leadership and management personnel and a good resource for any nurse. Too often nurses hide these issues and we need to make others aware of what can occur and take steps to bring these conditions out in the open." - Doody's Book Reviews. Today's health care landscape has brought many changes, challenges, and even turmoil to the workplace; stressors that can threaten the mental health of even the most stalwart and resilient of nurses. Targeting the complex set of stressors found in health care work environments, this unique, practical resource describes the impact of bullying, harassment, addictions, violence, and other triggers and the resulting adverse physiological and behavioral responses in these facilities. It presents evidence-based strategies to help health care professionals cope with unhealthy work environments. The book describes the characteristics of health care work environments that promote stress at personal and organizational levels, and their impact on the mental health of individuals working in them. It offers insight into individual and group dynamics and the role of the health care institution, workplace management, and individual employee in fostering both healthy and unhealthy work environments. The book investigates a variety of situations that can erode mental health among coworkers and offers evidence-based improvement strategies for creating healthier, more respectful workplace environments.
Buddhism has for thousands of years provided a spiritual foundation for the daily lives of millions of people around the world. But does Buddhism have anything to offer us--Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike--in today's world of work? Metcalf and Gallagher think it does. Spiritual wisdom, Western or Eastern, inspires and instructs us in living a good life. And that's just as true at work as at home. Buddha mind--a source of calm, compassion, and insight--exists within each of us, not just the historical Buddha. Being Buddha at Work shows how to embody that mind in the stress and clamor of the workplace--how to tap into the Buddha consciousness so we can relieve daily tensions and greet challenges with awareness, equanimity, and good humor. The book is divided into three sections. The first, "Becoming a Mindful Worker," covers Buddha's wisdom for our own work; the second, "Cultivating Mindful Work Relationships," focuses on how to work with other people; the third, "Creating a Mindful Workplace," deals with broader organizational topics. There is wisdom here for everyone--from frontline workers and team members, to supervisors and managers, to top executives and organizational leaders.
Exercise has long been touted anecdotally as an effective tool for mood improvement, but only recently has rigorous science caught up with these claims. There is now overwhelming evidence that regular exercise can help relieve low mood-from feelings of stress and anxiety to full depressive episodes.With Exercise for Mood and Anxiety, Michael Otto and Jasper Smits, well-known authorities on cognitive behavioral therapy, take their empirically-based mood regulation strategy from the clinic to the general public. Written for those with diagnosed mood disorders as well as those who simply need a new strategy for managing the low mood and stress that is an everyday part of life, this book provides readers with step-by-step guidance on how to start and maintain an exercise program geared towards improving mood, with a particular emphasis on understanding the relationship between mood and motivation. Readers learn to attend carefully to mood states prior to and following physical activity in order to leverage the full benefits of exercise, and that the trick to maintaining an exercise program is not in applying more effort, but in arranging one's environment so that less effort is needed. As a result readers not only acquire effective strategies for adopting a successful program, but are introduced to a broader philosophy for enhancing overall well-being. Providing patient vignettes, rich examples, and extensive step-by-step guidance on overcoming the obstacles that prevent adoption of regular exercise for mood, Exercise for Mood and Anxiety is a unique translation of scientific principles of clinical and social psychology into an action-based strategy for mood change.
Losing your job is one of the hardest challenges most people will face, even if they are volunteers. It can be a shock, a challenge to everything you have taken for granted and can cause upheaval in every aspect of your life. Yet it is possible to move on successfully and this book is about how to make the transition as short and easy as possible whatever your age or experience. It answers questions such as: How do I keep my dignity and self-esteem through the process of being given the news? How do I get the best possible deal and exit with aplomb? How much will it matter to a new employer that I have been made redundant? What is the best way of seizing the opportunity to redesign my life and career? What about money worries while I'm looking for a new job? How much do social media matter in job-searching? Which job-search techniques really work and which are a waste of time? What about freelance and interim work? With a foreword by Cary L. Cooper. Roger's Facing Redundancy brings a deep level of honesty, insight, and most importantly practical support, for career transition in the 21st century. (Katherine Tulpa, CEO, Association for Coaching).
Sunbathing in the Rain is undoubtedly the best book I have ever read about one person's experience of depression.' - Dorothy Rowe, author of Breaking the Bonds 'This upbeat, very readable and engaging view of depression as a temporary retrenchment, a breathing space in which to adjust better to life, makes encouraging reading.' - Spectator 'Gwyneth Lewis writes with clarity, beauty and metaphorical precision. She conveys the darkness, the silence, the selfishness, the mental clutter of depression brilliantly.' - Simon Hattenstone, Guardian 'Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis shares her personal story of wrestling with clinical depression and describes what she learned along the way about coping with the disease. The text is aimed primarily at those who are currently depressed and are struggling to recover. The emphasis throughout is on the healing power of self-acceptance and truth-telling. This might well be the Age of Depression. More people than ever now experience the disease directly or see a friend or relative succumb to it. Among their number is Gwyneth Lewis. And she set about writing this book simply because she wished something like it had existed for her when she was in the middle of her depression. Depression is assassination. The depressive is both victim and detective - charged with tracking down the perpetrator of his or her own murder. By drawing on her own experience of struggling with the affliction, by highlighting ways of coping, ways of truth-telling, and ways of thriving, in a straightforward, robust fashion full of casual wisdom and easy wit, Gwyneth re-embarks on a journey that nearly killed her first time round and returns with this, perhaps the first truly undogmatic, undemanding, downright useful book about depression.
First featured on a British poster produced during World War II, "Keep calm and carry on" has become the mantra of millions--but exactly how to keep calm remains a difficult question for most of us. The next time you are stressed by pressures at work, overwhelmed by life's challenges, or panicked by problems that seem unsolvable, reach for this book. In Little Ways to Keep Calm and Carry On, you'll find twenty short yet powerful lessons and anxiety-reducing techniques that will help you move past stressful moments with grace. Each lesson is so simple to learn and practice, you'll find that this pocket guide is all you really need whenever you need a little help keeping calm. This book has been awarded The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Seal of Merit -- an award bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties. Used alone or in conjunction with therapy, our books offer powerful tools readers can use to jump-start changes in their lives.
Societal awareness of transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) individuals is greater now than at any point in history, owing to the education of policy makers by advocacy organizations, the education of clinicians by research and scientific organizations, and the education of the general public by movies, television, and other media. However, most professional training programs for mental health professionals provide little to no education regarding gender diversity. Transgender Mental Health squarely addresses this deficit. This guide forgoes clinical jargon in favor of accessible, straightforward language designed to educate clinicians on how to address the basic needs of the TGNC community, thus increasing access to mental health care for TGNC individuals, which has been sorely lacking to this point. Rich in cases drawn from real clinical experience, the guide is organized into four sections. The first section includes a discussion of the gender spectrum and offers a history of the TGNC experience. This section also covers advocacy, particularly letter writing for gender marker changes and gender-affirming surgeries. The second section is dedicated to mental health factors in TGNC care and examines sex and sexuality, support systems, and transitioning and detransitioning. The third of the guide's sections addresses general physical health with TGNC individuals, including masculinizing and feminizing hormones, with an eye toward preparing practitioners to address the social, psychological, and physical needs of their patients. The final section discusses all major gender-affirming surgical procedures, as well as nonsurgical interventions. Each chapter includes summarizing key points and review questions at the end that not only test the reader's comprehension of the material but also provide additional information on the complicated political, social, and cultural barriers that many TGNC individuals experience as they attempt to secure adequate care.
Continuous activity and high job demands surround corporate environments. These demands are considered to be key triggers for workers' stress-related symptoms and poor health. It has been estimated by the American Institute of Stress (AIS) that US$ 300 billion/year are spent on conditions related to excessive stress levels. Of course, occupational stressors are an unavoidable part of working life. Experienced stress has helped us to survive for thousands of years and keeps us vigilant under critical situations. Of course, too much experienced stress can lead to serious psychological and physical health problems. This book is devoted to examining important issues related to coping with and preventing elevated occupational stress. This book also examines individual differences and organizational cultures that might exacerbate or mitigate experienced stress. If we consider all choices available, it is better to prevent than to treat. Prevention can be primary, when we prevent the stress-generating situation from occurring; secondary, when we provide alternatives to minimize the damage caused by the problem and tertiary, which involves containing losses that have occurred to prevent them from becoming more serious. This book on stress prevention and coping with stress is intended to assist occupational health professionals and academics to improve their abilities to help employees managing stress, but it also can be helpful for individual workers as they learn to better handle stressors at work. The research findings and views presented by these well-respected leaders in stress research provide tools for those currently experiencing workplace stress and supplies information concerning how stress can be prevented before it occurs.
This popular and accessible introduction to mental health is written for students, mental health practitioners and non-qualified professionals. Fully revised, this second edition is up to date with the latest knowledge on mental health conditions, good practice and the law. The authors explain key concepts in easily understandable language, accessible even to those with no prior knowledge of the subject. They detail the major mental health disorders, the issues surrounding them, and provide detailed information on: * treatment and support * risk assessment and management * mental illness and the Criminal Justice System * the Mental Health Act and the Mental Capacity Act Featuring case studies and exercises to assist learning, this is an invaluable resource for anyone working with people who are experiencing mental illness, including students and professionals in health and social care, housing and criminal justice.
Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it, trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From 1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word "stress" in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010 that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown exponentially over the past 40 years?In One Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the social and political realities that underlie those tensions. Becker shows that although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control-workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical warnings about the negative effects of stress on our physical and emotional health all place the responsibility for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves rather than tackling the root causes of stress.Examining both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.
Everybody wants it. But what exactly is happiness?The pursuit of happiness has been recognized by everyone from poets to politicians as what makes the world go round. The world's largest and fastest-growing industries - alcohol, pharmaceuticals, mind altering drugs, self-help books, counselling, travel and tourism - all profit heavily from ourintent to become completely happy with our lives.In the first comprehensive book to address this most basic of human desires, Daniel Nettle explores why we want to be happy, how we assess our levels of happiness, and the different ways that happiness is interpreted in different cultures. Using statistical information from the National ChildDevelopment Study, a project that has collected social and emotional data from thousands of people since 1958, Nettle shows the ways in which definitions and sources of happiness have changed over time.
Is your worrying keeping you from reaching your goals? In Mindfulness for Teen Worry, a clinical psychologist offers quick, easy-to-learn mindfulness skills teens can use anytime, anywhere to stop worries from growing and taking over. Let's face it--being a teen isn't easy. And if you're like a lot of other teens, you probably worry about getting good grades, fitting in with a certain crowd, or what the future will bring after high school. These are all completely normal worries, and signs that you are tuned in to your life and thinking about your goals. But what about chronic worrying--the kind that keeps you up at night, ruminating about that paper you just turned in, or that thing your friend said to you at lunch (what did she mean by that?), and so on. Sometimes worrying isn't helpful. In fact, it can get in the way of living your life! So, how can you start putting worry in its place before it takes up too much head space? Mindfulness for Teen Worry will show you how living in the moment will dissolve worry and help you stay grounded in the here and now. You'll learn powerful and easy-to-use mindfulness skills to manage the four most common worry struggles teens face: school pressure, coping with friendship and relationship problems, improving body image, and handling family conflicts. You'll discover why you worry and the long-term destructive impacts worry can have on your life. And most importantly, you'll be introduced to simple, effective techniques to help you become more mindful--like harnessing the power of the breath and how to relax your body in times of stress. If you struggle with worry or anxiety that gets in the way of being your best, this fun and friendly guide will help you maintain a mindful life in a frenzied world.
Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan’s perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from “reacting” to “responding” to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments.
Stop saying 'no' to opportunity, and start saying 'yes' to possibility Happy Accidents is your personal guide to transforming your life. As we take on task after task, responsibility after responsibility, we lose sight of who we are and why we're doing what we do; we rush through the day completing a to-do list, but we never really seem to accomplish the things that are most important. What goals do you have for your life? What steps have you taken toward them today? Consider this book your guide to getting back on track to your dreams and help inspire those around you. It's not about doing more or doing less, it's about making what you do worthy of the effort. From forging new relationships, stepping out of your comfort zone, and reframing your work--start valuing these as empowering choices you get to make toward a particular goal every day. To preserve our precious time and energy, we often default to 'no,' yet this only closes the door to our growth, while a 'yes' opens up a world of possibilities. The secret is adding 'yes, and' to our lives. This seductively simple turn of phrase opens the doors to better collaboration and positive relationships, and invites self-sustaining opportunities into our world. 'Yes, and' helps you get from where you are, as an individual or organization, to where you want to be. No person or organization is an island, and none of us reaches our goals alone. This book shows you how to build on the power of open-mindedness, cultivate supportive relationships, and adopt a win-win mindset to reignite your purpose and unleash your best. Harness the power of team collaboration, cooperation, and creativity Reframe 'mistakes' and 'bad ideas' into 'Happy Accidents' that lead to opportunities Communicate more effectively by learning how to listen actively and build on the pertinent information Relinquish some degree of control to allow for more growth and discovery Children have a natural inclination toward curiosity. As we grow into adults, our curiosity gradually takes a back seat to obligations, responsibility, and duty--but that spark remains, and can be reignited. Don't spend your life adrift in a sea of 'could've, would've, should've'--take back your sense of purpose, positivity, joy, time, and energy with the power of Happy Accidents.
The very things we do to control anxiety can make anxiety worse. This unique guide offers a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based approach to help you recognize the constant chatter of your anxious "monkey mind," stop feeding anxious thoughts, and find the personal peace you crave. Ancient sages compared the human mind to a monkey: constantly chattering, hopping from branch to branch--endlessly moving from fear to safety. If you are one of the millions of people whose life is affected by anxiety, you are familiar with this process. Unfortunately, you can't switch off the "monkey mind," but you can stop feeding the monkey--or stop rewarding it by avoiding the things you fear. Written by psychotherapist Jennifer Shannon, this book shows you how to stop anxious thoughts from taking over using proven-effective cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness techniques, as well as fun illustrations. By following the exercises in this book, you'll learn to identify your own anxious thoughts, question those thoughts, and uncover the core fears at play. Once you stop feeding the monkey, there are no limits to how expansive your life can feel. This book will show you how anxiety can only continue as long as you try to avoid it. And, paradoxically, only by seeking out and confronting the things that make you anxious can you reverse the cycle that keeps your fears alive.
Compelling stories that present a new view of ADHD Smart but Stuck offers 15 true and compelling stories about intelligent, capable teens and adults who have gotten "stuck" at school, work, and/or in social relationships because of their ADHD. Dr. Brown highlights the often unrecognized role that emotions play in this complex disorder. He explains why even very bright people with ADHD get stuck because they can focus well on some tasks that interest them, but often can't focus adequately on other important tasks and relationships. The first book to explain and illustrate the crucial role of emotions in the daily functioning of those living with ADHD Brown, Associate Director of the Yale Clinic for Attention & Related Disorders, is an internationally known authority on ADHD Drawing on the latest research findings, the book describes strategies and treatments for getting "unstuck" to move on to a more rewarding and productive life.
A powerful and personalized process to improve your life and advance your career Do you sometimes feel stuck, despite real efforts to gain momentum on goals you've set? Momentum means you're doing more than simply getting things done. It's that feeling of satisfaction, the belief that you can achieve big goals and complete important projects that fulfill you both personally and professionally. Get Momentum coaches you in the mindset, skill set, and toolkit required to make progress on the items you have on your life and work goals faster and easier, while living a less stressful, more meaningful life. The authors, Jodi Womack and her husband Jason Womack, provide valuable insights into the psychology of change and how to direct your focus to experience fulfillment at work and in life. The authors share what they know having built a successful executive coaching firm together, as well as facilitating leadership workshops in their home town and more than twenty countries around the world. Contrary to the promise of many self-help/business books, they believe there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for success.Get Momentum teaches you how to make proactive changes based on the solid foundation of your own "quality of life" criteria. Jodi and Jason offer clear, step-by-step guidance on how to define your personal criteria so that you can Get Momentum, improve your life and enhance your career. You will learn how to: Answer the Call (What to do when you say "Someone should do something about this!") Organize a Team and Gain the Perspective of People You Trust Measure Something (Just Not Everything At Once) Experiment Specifically and Practice Deliberately Build Momentum, Recognize Your Wins, and Pay It Forward With kindness, accountability and encouragement, Get Momentum will help you tap into your natural way of being to achieve professional goals and personal experiences that are on your bucket list, living a life you're proud to share with others.
Creating Healthy Workplaces includes interventions that relate the efforts undertaken by researchers and organizations to reduce stress and improve the mental and physical health of employees through positive change initiatives. Those working in the field of occupational stress have received criticism that too much emphasis has been placed on negative issues and that positive initiatives have been largely ignored. This book delves into both the positive and the stress fields and compares the types of interventions each entail. Some of the interventions described target individuals and their attitudes and behaviours, others target workplace relationships, work units and the wider organization. Outcomes such as reduced occurrences of smoking, obesity, depression, elevated blood pressure, accidents and workplace injuries, absence and staff turnover are reported. The factors associated with the success of these interventions are identified and advice is given as to how you might proceed to develop worksite interventions of your own.
It is now widely acknowledged that there is more to health than just the absence of illness. This book aims to widen the perspective of health professionals to encompass the concept of well-being across the lifespan. It has been written to introduce students to the theory and practical application of health improvement and well-being in the context of public health, providing global as well as domestic perspectives on key concepts, in particular: social and health inequalities, social justice, political influences, commissioning, funding and delivery of services. Each chapter defines and provides an outline of theoretical perspectives relevant to each topic, allowing the reader to critically evaluate the accepted wisdom in each of the fields under discussion. Case studies illustrate local and global perspectives and questions throughout the book encourage students to think and reflect on the key points of each chapter and apply theory to practice. With a delicate blend of theory and practice, Health Improvement and Well-Being considers the key influences on health improvement and the best ways to tackle them as a health professional. This book is key reading for experienced and senior public health professionals as well as masters level students taking courses in public health, health improvement or health promotion, or taking modules in health improvement as part of a more general health science course.
Depression can feel like a downward spiral, pulling you into a vortex of sadness, fatigue, and apathy. In The Upward Spiral, neuroscientist Alex Korb demystifies the intricate brain processes that cause depression and offers a practical and effective approach to getting better. Based on the latest research in neuroscience, this book provides dozens of straightforward tips you can do every day to rewire your brain and create an upward spiral towards a happier, healthier life. Whether you suffer from depression or just want a better understanding of the brain, this book offers an engaging and informative look at the neuroscience behind our emotions, thoughts, and actions. The truth is that there isn't one big solution to depression, but there are numerous simple steps you can take to alter brain activity and chemistry. Some are as easy as relaxing certain muscles to reduce anxiety, or getting more sunlight to improve your mood. Small steps in the right direction can have profound effects--giving you the power to become your best self as you literally reshape your brain, one small change at a time.
Stay in the moment, stay in the game! With this fun and engaging workbook for young athletes, you'll find practical ways to cope with stress and improve your performance, no matter what sport you play. If you're like many other high school or college students, you probably feel pressure to perform at a high level--both in the classroom and on the field. Unfortunately, this pressure can cause lots of stress and anxiety. To make matters worse, you may find it difficult to effectively manage all of these demands on your time, energy, and health. This is where mindfulness can help. Mindfulness allows you to stay present, focus, and be calm with your thoughts and emotions, no matter how stressful life gets. In Mindfulness for Student Athletes, you'll find practical and tactical ways to cope with stress and anxiety in the moment, prevent stress in the future, and experience more satisfaction and enjoyment while playing sports. You'll also find proven-effective tools to naturally enhance your performance. The mindfulness skills outlined in this workbook will not only help you on the field--but in life as well. You'll be able to take what you've learned and apply it to any situation, from job interviews to scoring a touchdown. What a gift to have!
Straightforward and easy to read yet thorough and accurate, this book provides a complete overview of depression that describes the historical background of clinical depression, the various types of mood disorders, and their impact on the health and well-being of people and society. * Explains simply what depression is, what the causes are, what the symptoms look like, and what the best treatment options are * Provides up-to-date information based on current scholarly and clinical materials presented in a very clear and understandable presentation that is ideal for high school and undergraduate students as well as general readers
LGBT Psychology and Mental Health: Emerging Research and Advances brings together concise, substantive reviews of what is new or on the horizon in science and in key areas of clinical practice. It will equip professionals at institutions with mental health programs that deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues with information and insight to help psychologists, mental health clinicians, and counselors better serve the LGBT populations that, increasingly, are seeking their services. The book begins with introductory chapters that present an overview of the field, chronicle the relationship between the LGBT community and the field of psychology in past decades, and identify emerging issues covered in the volume. It then addresses subjects such as social psychology and LGBT populations, health disparities and LGBT populations, the evolution of developmental theory related to the LBGT populations, emerging policy issues in LGBT health and psychology, and recent efforts to make the field of psychology more trans-inclusive and affirmative. Chapters are also dedicated to examining contemporary, LGBT-affirmative psychoanalysis and treating addictions and substance abuse in the LGBT community. The book concludes with chapters that address how the concept of intersectionality can serve as a way to better understand LGBT members who possess multiple cultural identities and the unique stressors they experience in daily life. The final chapter summarizes issues that bridge the contributions provided by the authors, and it highlights current issues of focal concern in order to project future directions for the field of LGBT psychology in the next two decades.
Trust is fundamental to everyday interactions and the functioning of society. How trust develops, or fails to develop, within contexts of severe mental illness is a pertinent topic for social scientists and healthcare professionals, not simply because it is an under-researched area but because heightened uncertainty and amplified vulnerability amidst psychosis represent a crucible of the conditions where trust becomes relevant. Grounded in research within this crucible, this book explores a number of questions which are central to contemporary theoretical debates around the nature of trust. The authors link these abstract concerns to empirical analysis, involving interviews with service-users, practitioners and managers. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the concept of trust, including social science researchers and students, as well as practitioners, managers and policy makers working with vulnerable people.
It's not just big choices that can radically change our lives--sometimes it's the small ones. Activating Happiness offers powerful, evidence-based strategies to help you conquer low motivation, nix negative moods, and defeat depression by actively making positive choices in small, everyday moments. If you have depression or just suffer from low mood and lack of motivation, you know that your life isn't going to change with one grand, sweeping gesture. But you can make important decisions every day--whether it's getting off the couch and going for a walk, signing up for a course in pottery or screenwriting, or just setting aside some time to meet and chat with a good friend over coffee. These little things won't change your life all at once. But over time, they will shape the way you live and see the world and keep you on a path to wellness. In Activating Happiness, you'll find solid strategies based in behavioral activation and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you break the cycle of avoidance, guilt, shame, and hopelessness that can take hold when you're feeling your lowest. Using this guide, you'll find little, doable ways to "show up" to your life, get the ball rolling, and start really feeling better, instead of just reassuring others. You'll learn to set healthy goals for your body like eating and sleeping well, as well as healthy goals for your mind. Most importantly, you'll discover how to view your life through the lens of your own deepest values, which will spark a commitment to real, lasting change. The best thing about change is that you can start anywhere. By building a life--moment by moment--of rewarding behaviors that correspond to your values, you have the recipe for getting and staying well at your fingertips. This book will guide your way.
Our lives are getting faster and faster. We are engulfed in constant distraction from email, social media and our 'always on' work culture. We are too busy, too overloaded with information and too focused on analytical left-brain thinking processes to be creative. Too Fast to Think exposes how our current work practices, media culture and education systems are detrimental to innovation. The speed and noise of modern life is undermining the clarity and quiet that is essential to power individual thought. Our best ideas are often generated when we are free to think diffusely, in an uninterrupted environment, which is why moments of inspiration so often occur in places completely separate to our offices. To reclaim creativity, Too Fast to Think teaches you how to retrain your brain into allowing creative ideas to emerge, before they are shut down by interruption, distraction or the self-doubt of your over-rational brain. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to maximize their creative potential, as well as that of their team. Supported by cutting-edge research from the University of the Arts London and insightful interviews with business leaders, academics, artists, politicians and psychologists, Chris Lewis takes a holistic approach to explain the 8 crucial traits that are inherently linked to creation and innovation.
For the past twenty years, pioneering psychologist Stephen Joseph has worked with survivors of trauma. His studies have yielded a startling discovery: that a wide range of traumatic events--from illness, divorce, separation, assault, and bereavement to accidents, natural disasters, and terrorism--can act as catalysts for positive change. Boldly challenging the conventional wisdom about trauma and its aftermath, Joseph demonstrates that rather than ruining one's life, a traumatic event can actually improve it. Drawing on the wisdom of ancient philosophers, the insights of evolutionary biologists, and the optimism of positive psychologists, What Doesn't Kill Us reveals how all of us can navigate change and adversity-- traumatic or otherwise--to find new meaning, purpose, and direction in life.
Are you truly in danger or has your brain simply "tricked" you into thinking you are? In The Worry Trick, psychologist and anxiety expert David Carbonell shows how anxiety hijacks the brain and offers effective techniques to help you break the cycle of worry, once and for all. Anxiety is a powerful force. It makes us question ourselves and our decisions, causes us to worry about the future, and fills our days with dread and emotional turbulence. Based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this book is designed to help you break the cycle of worry. Worry convinces us there's danger, and then tricks us into getting into fight, flight, or freeze mode--even when there is no danger. The techniques in this book, rather than encouraging you to avoid or try to resist anxiety, shows you how to see the trick that underlies your anxious thoughts, and how avoidance can backfire and make anxiety worse. If you're ready to start observing your anxious feelings with distance and clarity--rather than getting tricked once again--this book will show you how.
Ease your anxiety and find calm through the healing practice of mindfulnessBy embracing mindfulness you can transform your life forever, and renew your connection to the world around you. With the simple but powerful practices of mindfulness and meditation you will learn to be more attentive and peaceful, so that you can relieve stress, regulate your emotions, and achieve focus and clarity. Mindfulness Made Simple will give you a concise introduction to the practice of mindfulness, with simple exercises and practical techniques to apply mindfulness and meditation to the obstacles in your hectic daily life.Mindfulness Made Simple will help guide you on your journey to a calmer, healthier mind, with:* Concise introduction to mindfulness and its many psychological benefits* Step-by-step introduction to your first meditation * 5 introductory meditations and 8 advanced meditations to deepen your practice* Simple exercises and journal prompts to keep you engaged* Helpful tips to help you stay motivated on your journey to complete mindfulness* Foreword by mindfulness expert Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.Mindfulness Made Simple will show you how to soothe your mind and calm your nerves with a practical and personalized approach to mindfulness.
Every day millions of people struggle with psychological and emotional problems. The Stressed Sex sets out to answer a simple, but crucial, question: are rates of psychological disorder different for men and women? The implications - for individuals and society alike - are far-reaching, and to date, this important issue has been largely ignored in all the debates raging about gender differences.Now Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman present a ground-breaking combination of epidemiological analysis and evidence-based science to get to the bottom of what's really going on. They discover which mental health problems are more common in men, and which are seen most often in women. And, in a finding that is sure to provoke lively debate, they reveal that, in any given year, women experience higher rates of psychological disorder than men. Why might this be the case? The Stressed Sexexplains current scientific thinking on the possible reasons - and considers what might be done to address the imbalance.
A provocative, personal approach to leadership based on in-depth research with hundreds of executives around the world Confronted by disruptive change and economic turbulence, many of today's leaders find themselves ill-equipped to manage the hazards they now face. They must contend with chronic uncertainty, cynical employees, and personal burnout. Most are poorly served by the prevailing paradigm that obsessively focuses on what we do to produce short-term results while sabotaging who we are as healthy human beings. Few have seen alternatives, until now. Grounded proposes a new approach that's designed for actual humans who must grapple with these forces. This new paradigm speaks to our better selves. Based on the author's Healthy Leader model, it focuses on the six personal dimensions that fuel--and refuel--the world's top leaders: physical, emotional, intellectual, social, vocational, and spiritual health. The book argues that leaders at every level can be more self-aware, develop their untapped potential, and drive significantly better results--for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Shows readers how to build a personal leadership model that works with their values, goals and capabilities Features fresh stories from leaders in a variety of organizations including the New York Fire Department, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Lego Group, and Medstar Health Gives leaders practical tools to face their toughest challenges with greater skill, confidence, and impact By developing themselves and mastering the six dimensions, readers can gain the stamina and strength to not only weather tough times but to achieve much, much more.
Imagine if we stopped trying to "manage" the stress in our workplaces and personal lives. What if we recognized, instead, that the challenges we face every day could actually make us stronger, smarter, and more successful. We wouldn't feel victimized by the stress in our lives; with a change in how we view these challenges, we become capable of resolving them and winning the day. Global businesses, governments, and communities are profoundly changing their approaches to adversity and challenges. The Resilience Advantage reveals the techniques and methodology we all can apply in our workplaces and homes. Filled with professional and personal stories, pragmatic research, powerful case studies, and practical actionable tools, this book IS the formula to help each of us turn our challenges into our Resilience Advantage.
According to a major health survey, nearly half of all Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives -- more than a quarter in the last year. Can this be true? What exactly does it mean, anyway? What's a disorder, and what's just a struggle with real life? This lucid and incisive book cuts through both professional jargon and polemical hot air, to describe the intense political and intellectual struggles over what counts as a "real" disorder, and what goes into the "DSM," the psychiatric bible. Is schizophrenia a disorder? Absolutely. Is homosexuality? It was -- till gay rights activists drove it out of the DSM a generation ago. What about new and controversial diagnoses? Is "social anxiety disorder" a way of saying that it's sick to be shy, or "female sexual arousal disorder" that it's sick to be tired? An advisor to the DSM, but also a fierce critic of exaggerated overuse, McNally defends the careful approach of describing disorders by patterns of symptoms that can be seen, and illustrates how often the system medicalizes everyday emotional life. Neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology may illuminate the biological bases of mental illness, but at this point, McNally argues, no science can draw a bright line between disorder and distress. In a pragmatic and humane conclusion, he offers questions for patients and professionals alike to help understand, and cope with, the sorrows and psychopathologies of everyday life.
A guide to the latest research on how young people can develop positive ethnic-racial identities and strong interracial relations Today's young people are growing up in an increasingly ethnically and racially diverse society. How do we help them navigate this world productively, given some of the seemingly intractable conflicts we constantly hear about? In Below the Surface, Deborah Rivas-Drake and Adriana Umaña-Taylor explore the latest research in ethnic and racial identity and interracial relations among diverse youth in the United States. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including developmental psychology, social psychology, education, and sociology, the authors demonstrate that young people can have a strong ethnic-racial identity and still view other groups positively, and that in fact, possessing a solid ethnic-racial identity makes it possible to have a more genuine understanding of other groups. During adolescence, teens reexamine, redefine, and consolidate their ethnic-racial identities in the context of family, schools, peers, communities, and the media. The authors explore each of these areas and the ways that ideas of ethnicity and race are implicitly and explicitly taught. They provide convincing evidence that all young people--ethnic majority and minority alike--benefit from engaging in meaningful dialogues about race and ethnicity with caring adults in their lives, which help them build a better perspective about their identity and a foundation for engaging in positive relationships with those who are different from them. Timely and accessible, Below the Surface is an ideal resource for parents, teachers, educators, school administrators, clergy, and all who want to help young people navigate their growth and development successfully.
A provocative new approach to race in the workplace What role should racial difference play in the American workplace? As a nation, we rely on civil rights law to address this question, and the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemingly answered it: race must not be a factor in workplace decisions. In After Civil Rights, John Skrentny contends that after decades of mass immigration, many employers, Democratic and Republican political leaders, and advocates have adopted a new strategy to manage race and work. Race is now relevant not only in negative cases of discrimination, but in more positive ways as well. In today's workplace, employers routinely practice "racial realism," where they view race as real--as a job qualification. Many believe employee racial differences, and sometimes immigrant status, correspond to unique abilities or evoke desirable reactions from clients or citizens. They also see racial diversity as a way to increase workplace dynamism. The problem is that when employers see race as useful for organizational effectiveness, they are often in violation of civil rights law. After Civil Rights examines this emerging strategy in a wide range of employment situations, including the low-skilled sector, professional and white-collar jobs, and entertainment and media. In this important book, Skrentny urges us to acknowledge the racial realism already occurring, and lays out a series of reforms that, if enacted, would bring the law and lived experience more in line, yet still remain respectful of the need to protect the civil rights of all workers.
Case studies and strategies for more effective multi-generational management Clash of the Generations explores this new and increasingly common workplace phenomenon, and provides strategies to help managers navigate this ever more complex maze. Traditionally, older workers would retire and make room for the next generation; instead, Baby Boomers are now prolonging their time in the workplace, yet the successive generations are still coming in. Senior leaders are now left to manage a blended workplace comprised of up to four generations--each with their own ideas of work ethic, work/life balance, long-term career goals, and much more. Management is challenging at the best of times, but the new prevalence of generation gaps--sometimes even layered--add an entirely new dimension to an already complex responsibility. This book presents case studies and interviews with representatives of companies with age-diverse workforces, detailing innovative strategies for smoothing out the bumps and helping everyone work together. Managers have long wished that their positions came with an instruction manual, and this book delivers with a host of effective inter-generational management strategies illustrated by real-world companies. Manage the multi-generation workplace more effectively Navigate the generational culture clash Adopt proven strategies for helping everyone get along Promote a more positive culture amidst clashing expectations Every generation in the workplace has value, each has their own strengths, their own weaknesses, and their own unique talents. Each is indispensable, and when they come together as a synergistic force, they can be unstoppable. Effective management means bringing out the best in your workforce, and the strategies presented in Clash of the Generations help you streamline your varied workforce into a team more valuable than the sum of its parts.
At its optimistic best, America has embraced its identity as the world's melting pot. Today it is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, and new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economy, and politics. The concept of a "minority white" may instill fear among some Americans, but William H. Frey, the man behind the demographic research, points out that demography is destiny, and the fear of a more racially diverse nation will almost certainly dissipate over time. Through a compelling narrative and eye-catching charts and maps, eminent demographer Frey interprets and expounds on the dramatic growth of minority populations in the United States. He finds that without these expanding groups, America could face a bleak future: this new generation of young minorities, who are having children at a faster rate than whites, is infusing our aging labor force with vitality and innovation. In contrast with the labor force-age population of Japan, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, the U.S. labor force-age population is set to grow 5 percent by 2030. Diversity Explosion shares the good news about diversity in the coming decades, and the more globalized, multiracial country that the U.S. is becoming. Contents A Pivotal Period for Race in America Old versus Young: Cultural Generation Gaps America's New Racial Map Hispanics Fan Out: Who Goes Where? Asians in America: The Newest Minority Surge The Great Migration of Blacks--In Reverse White Population Shifts--A Zero-Sum Melting Pot Cities and Suburbs Neighborhood Segregation: Toward a New Racial Paradigm Multiracial Marriages and Multiracial America Race and Politics: Expanding the Battleground America on the Cusp
Everything Is Now brings together all the short fiction of Michelle Cliff, featuring fourteen new pieces as well as the stories from her two previous short fiction collections (Bodies of Water and The Store of a Million Items).Cliff, born in Jamaica and raised both there and in New York, skillfully weaves her own experiences into her fiction, exploring race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.With stunning lyricism, intelligence, and passion, Cliff confronts the dualities of our complex world: black and white, America and the third world, past and present, femininity and masculinity, colonialism and revolution. Touching on such vital themes as memory, the passage of time, familial relationships, the presence of death, and the cross-influence of cultures, Michelle CliffOCOs stories are broad in scope, rich in substance, and urgent in their message."
In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science--and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality. Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.
While many modern societies are noted for their diversity, the resulting challenge is to determine how citizens from different backgrounds and cultures can see themselves and each other as equals, and be treated equally. In Genuine Multiculturalism, Cecil Foster shows that a society's failure to bridge these differences is the tragedy of modern living and that pretending it is possible to mechanically develop fraternity and solidarity among diverse groups is akin to seeking out comedy. Arguing that genuine multiculturalism is the search for social justice by individuals who have been trapped by ascribed identities or newcomers who have been shut out of perceived ethnic homelands, Foster details how this process, in essence, is the story of the Americas. Reconceptionalizing the terms of multiculturalism, he offers an intervention into Canada's claim that its definition and practice are based on recognizing equality of citizenship. Identifying genuine multiculturalism as an ongoing work in progress, rather than a tightly defined policy position, Foster challenges readers to imagine a greater and more harmonious ideal. A necessary theoretical reconsideration of diversity within society, Genuine Multiculturalism refocuses the debate about ideals and practices in modern societies.
"With unsparing candor, Susan Messer thrusts us into a time when racial tensions sundered friends and neighbors and turned families upside down. The confrontations in Grand River and Joy are complex, challenging, bitterly funny, and---painful though it is to acknowledge it---spot-on accurate." ---Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Half a Heart "Grand River and Joy is a rare novel of insight and inspiration. It's impossible not to like a book this well-written and meaningful---not to mention as historically significant, humorous, and meditative." ---Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Be Mine Halloween morning 1966, Harry Levine arrives at his wholesale shoe warehouse to find an ethnic slur soaped on the front window. As he scavenges around the sprawling warehouse basement, looking for the supplies he needs to clean the window, he makes more unsettling discoveries: a stash of Black Power literature; marijuana; a new phone line running off his own; and a makeshift living room, arranged by Alvin, the teenaged tenant who lives with his father, Curtis, above the warehouse. Accustomed to sloughing off fears about Detroit's troubled inner-city neighborhood, Harry dismisses the soaped window as a Halloween prank and gradually dismantles "Alvin's lounge" in a silent conversation with the teenaged tenant. Still, these events and discoveries draw him more deeply into the frustrations and fissures permeating his city in the months leading up to the Detroit riots. Grand River and Joy, named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions exploding in the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. Grand River and Joy is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history.
Social inclusion is on the agenda of governments, policymakers, and nonstate actors around the world. Underpinning this concern is the realization that despite progress on poverty reduction, some people continue to feel left out. This report aims to unpack the concept of social inclusion and understand better how policies can be designed to further inclusion. First, the report offers a definition of social inclusion as the process of improving the terms for individuals and groups to take part in society. It unpacks different domains of society that excluded groups and individuals are at particular risk of being left out of -- markets, services, and spaces. Second, the report discusses the most important global mega-trends such as migration, climate chnage, and aging of societies, which will impact challenges and opportunities for inclusion. Finally, it argues that despite these challenges, change towards inclusion is possible and offers examples of inclusionary policies.
In recent years, colleges have successfully increased the racial diversity of their student bodies. They have been less successful, however, in diversifying their faculties. This book identifies the ways in which minority students make occupational choices, what their attitudes are toward a career in academia, and why so few become college professors. Working with a large sample of high-achieving minority students from a variety of institutions, the authors conclude that minority students are no less likely than white students to aspire to academic careers. But because minorities are less likely to go to college and less likely to earn high grades within college, few end up going to graduate school. The shortage of minority academics is not a result of the failure of educational institutions to hire them; but of the very small pool of minority Ph.D. candidates. In examining why some minorities decide to become academics, the authors conclude that same-race role models are no more effective than white role models and that affirmative action contributes to the problem by steering minority students to schools where they perform relatively poorly. They end with policy recommendations on how more minority students might be attracted to an academic career.
Do computers foster cultural diversity? Ecological sustainability? In our age of high-tech euphoria we seem content to leave tough questions like these to the experts. That dangerous inclination is at the heart of this important examination of the commercial and educational trends that have left us so uncritically optimistic about global computing. Contrary to the attitudes that have been marketed and taught to us, says C. A. Bowers, the fact is that computers operate on a set of Western cultural assumptions and a market economy that drives consumption. Our indoctrination includes the view of global computing innovations as inevitable and on a par with social progress--a perspective dismayingly suggestive of the mindset that engendered the vast cultural and ecological disruptions of the industrial revolution and world colonialism. In Let Them Eat Data Bowers discusses important issues that have fallen into the gap between our perceptions and the realities of global computing, including the misuse of the theory of evolution to justify and legitimate the global spread of computers, and the ecological and cultural implications of unmooring knowledge from its local contexts as it is digitized, commodified, and packaged for global consumption. He also suggests ways that educators can help us think more critically about technology. Let Them Eat Data is essential reading if we are to begin democratizing technological decisions, conserving true cultural diversity and intergenerational forms of knowledge, and living within the limits and possibilities of the earth's natural systems.
About every eight decades, coincident with the most stressful and perilous events in U.S. history--the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and the Great Depression and World War II--a new, positive, accomplished, and group-oriented "civic generation" emerges to change the course of history and remake America. The Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) is America's newest civic generation. In their 2008 book, Millennial Makeover, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais made a prescient argument that the Millennial Generation would change American politics for good. Later that year, a huge surge of participation from young voters helped to launch Barack Obama into the White House. Now, in Millennial Momentum, Winograd and Hais investigate how the beliefs and practices of the Millennials are transforming other areas of American culture, from education to entertainment, from the workplace to the home, and from business to politics and government. The Millennials' cooperative ethic and can-do spirit have only just begun to make their mark, and are likely to continue to reshape American values for decades to come. Drawing from an impressive array of demographic data, popular texts, and personal interviews, the authors show how the ethnically diverse, socially tolerant, and technologically fluent Millennials can help guide the United States to retain its leadership of the world community and the global marketplace. They also illustrate why this generation's unique blend of civic idealism and savvy pragmatism will enable us to overcome the internal culture wars and institutional malaise currently plaguing the country. Millennial Momentum offers a message of hope for a deeply divided nation.
Russell Charles Leong shows an astonishing range in this new collection of stories. From struggling war refugees to monks, intellectuals to sex workers, his characters are both linked and separated by their experiences as modern Asians and Asian Americans. In styles ranging from naturalism to high-camp parody, Leong goes beneath stereotypes of immigrant and American-born Chinese, hustlers and academics, Buddhist priests and street people. Displacement and marginalization and the search for love and liberation are persistent themes. Leong's people are set apart, by sexuality, by war, by AIDS, by family dislocations. From this vantage point on the outskirts of conventional life, they often see clearly the accommodations we make with identity and with desire. A young teen-ager, sold into prostitution to finance her brothers education, saves her hair trimmings to burn once a year in a temple ritual, the one part of her body that is under her own control. A documentary film producer, raised in a noisy Hong Kong family, marvels at the popular image of Asian Americans as a silenced minority. Traditional Chinese families struggle to come to terms with gay children and AIDS.
This book makes use of in-depth interviews with the residents most active in shaping the racially diverse urban communities in which they live. As most of them are white and progressive, it provides a unique view into the particular ways that color-blind ideologies work among liberals, particularly those who encounter racial diversity regularly. It reveals not just the pervasiveness of color-blind ideology and coded race talk among these residents, but also the difficulty they encounter when they try to speak or work outside of the rubric of color-blindness. This is especially vivid in their concrete discussions of the neighborhoods' diversity and the choices they and their families make to live in and contribute to these communities. This close examination of how they wrestle with diversity in everyday life reveals the process whereby they unintentionally re-create a white habitus inside of these racially diverse communities, where despite their pro-diversity stance they still act upon and preserve comfort and privileges for whites. The book also provides a close examination of white racial identity, as the context of a diverse community provides both the catalyst and, significantly, the space for an examination of an unarticulated racial consciousness, which has implications for our study of whiteness more generally. The layers of ambivalence and pride surrounding the fact of diversity in these neighborhoods and residents' lives reveal both limitations and hope as the nation itself becomes more diverse. This critical and yet compassionate book extends our understanding of contemporary racial ideology and racial discourse, as well as our understanding of the complexities of whiteness.
In 1917, Fort Ord was established in the tiny subdivision of Seaside, California. Over the course of the 20th century, it held great national and military importance--a major launching point for World War II operations, the first base in the military to undergo complete integration, the West Coast's most important training base for draftees in the Vietnam War, a site of important civil rights movements--until its closure in the 1990s. Alongside it, the city of Seaside took form. Racial Beachhead offers the story of this city, shaped over the decades by military policies of racial integration in the context of the ideals of the American civil rights movement. Middle class blacks, together with other military families--black, white, Hispanic, and Asian--created a local politics of inclusion that continues to serve as a reminder that integration can work to change ideas about race. Though Seaside's relationship with the military makes it unique, at the same time the story of Seaside is part and parcel of the story of 20th century American town life. Its story contributes to the growing history of cities of color--those minority-majority places that are increasingly the face of urban America.
Good parents, hard conversations -- From color-blindness to race-conscious parenting -- Where do I start? -- What does a "healthy" white kid look like? -- Do we have to call it racism? -- Our bodies in racial scripts -- Diversity is confusing! -- What does resistance look like? -- Conclusion: A just racial future. With a foreword by Tim Wise, Raising White Kids is for families, churches, educators, and communities who want to equip their children to be active and able participants in a society that is becoming one of the most racially diverse in the world while remaining full of racial tensions. For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums. These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities and schools? Should we teach our children to be "colorblind"? Or, should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways? While a great deal of public discussion exists in regard to the impact of race and racism on children of color, meaningful dialogue about and resources for understanding the impact of race on white children are woefully absent. Raising White Kids steps into that void.
A Clan Mother story for the twenty-first century, Sacred Wilderness explores the lives of four women of different eras and backgrounds who come together to restore foundation to a mixed-up, mixed-blood woman--a woman who had been living the American dream, and found it a great maw of emptiness. These Clan Mothers may be wisdom-keepers, but they are anything but stern and aloof--they are women of joy and grief, risking their hearts and sometimes their lives for those they love. The novel swirls through time, from present-day Minnesota to the Mohawk territory of the 1620s, to the ancient biblical world, brought to life by an indigenous woman who would come to be known as the Virgin Mary. The Clan Mothers reveal secrets, the insights of prophecy, and stories that are by turns comic, so painful they can break your heart, and perhaps even powerful enough to save the world. In lyrical, lushly imagined prose, Sacred Wilderness is a novel of unprecedented necessity.
In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color--away from brown and yellow and black and white--and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important. Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing--and believing in--race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.
"Culture counts" has long been a rallying cry among health advocates and policymakers concerned with racial disparities in health care. A generation ago, the women's health movement led to a host of changes that also benefited racial minorities, including more culturally aware medical staff, enhanced health education, and the mandated inclusion of women and minorities in federally funded research. Many health professionals would now agree that cultural competence is important in clinical settings, but in what ways? Shattering Culture provides an insightful view of medicine and psychiatry as they are practiced in today's culturally diverse clinical settings. The book offers a compelling account of the many ways culture shapes how doctors conduct their practices and how patients feel about the care they receive. Based on interviews with clinicians, health care staff, and patients, Shattering Culture shows the human face of health care in America. Building on over a decade of research led by Mary-Jo Good, the book delves into the cultural backgrounds of patients and their health care providers, as well as the institutional cultures of clinical settings, to illuminate how these many cultures interact and shape the quality of patient care. Sarah Willen explores the controversial practice of matching doctors and patients based on a shared race, ethnicity, or language and finds a spectrum of arguments challenging its usefulness, including patients who may fear being judged negatively by providers from the same culture. Seth Hannah introduces the concept of cultural environments of hyperdiversity describing complex cultural identities. Antonio Bullon and Mary-Jo Good demonstrate how regulations meant to standardize the caregiving process--such as the use of templates and check boxes instead of narrative notes--have steadily limited clinician flexibility, autonomy, and the time they can dedicate to caring for patients. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song looks at positive doctor-patient relationships in mental health care settings and finds that the most successful of these are based on mutual "recognition"--patients who can express their concerns and clinicians who validate them.
Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Signs of Hope tells the story of a narrative inquiry with three deafhearing families. For many of us, deafness represents loss and silence. For others, being deaf is a genetic quirk; an opportunity for learning, spiritual adventure and reward. For yet others, it is the most natural thing in the world; a connection to a genealogical layer of signing ancestors and the continuation of a culture. Amid the noise of mainstream, medical and educational discourses of deafness, here are family voices demanding to be heard - whether spoken or signed - that challenge audiological and surgical intervention, that call for scrutiny and critique of 'inclusive' deaf-related pedagogical practices, that rail against marginalisation of members of minority cultures. Over four years, Donna West has recorded the stories of three families who wish to counter and resist what they see as damaging misconceptions and discriminatory constructions of deafness and deaf hearing family life. Here, spaces are created that respect and acknowledge human beings - adults, children, deaf, hearing - as storytellers. The poetic and performative narratives at the heart of this book reveal not only the ways in which hurtful definitions of, and discrimination towards, deaf people and signing deaf hearing families is destabilised, but also the ways in which celebration of deaf culture and sign language are affirming and vital for healthy family life.
With essays by Ron Briley, Michael Ezra, Sarah K. Fields, Billy Hawkins, Jorge Iber, Kurt Kemper, Michael E. Lomax, Samuel O. Regalado, Richard Santillan, and Maureen Smith This anthology explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, and sports and analyzes the forces that shaped the African American and Latino sports experience in post-World War II America. Contributors reveal that sports often reinforced dominant ideas about race and racial supremacy but that at other times sports became a platform for addressing racial and social injustices. The African American sports experience represented the continuation of the ideas of Black Nationalism--racial solidarity, black empowerment, and a determination to fight against white racism. Three of the essayists discuss the protest at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. In football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and track and field, African American athletes moved toward a position of group strength, establishing their own values and simultaneously rejecting the cultural norms of whites. Among Latinos, athletic achievement inspired community celebrations and became a way to express pride in ethnic and religious heritages as well as a diversion from the work week. Sports was a means by which leadership and survival tactics were developed and used in the political arena and in the fight for justice.
In a work that will significantly influence the political discussion with respect to race and class politics, one of the country's most influential sociologists focuses on the rising inequality in American society and the need for a progressive, multiracial political coalition to combat it. The culmination of decades of distinguished scholarship, The Bridge over the Racial Divide brilliantly demonstrates how political power is disproportionately concentrated among the most advantaged segments of society and how the monetary, trade, and tax policies of recent years have deepened this power imbalance. Developing his earlier views on race in contemporary society, William Julius Wilson gives a simple, straightforward, and crucially important diagnosis of the problem of rising social inequality in the United States and details a set of recommendations for dealing with it. Wilson argues that as long as middle- and working-class groups are fragmented along racial lines, they will fail to see how their combined efforts could change the political imbalance and thus promote policies that reflect their interests. He shows how a vision of American society that highlights racial differences rather than commonalities makes it difficult for Americans to see the need and appreciate the potential for mutual political support across racial lines. Multiracial political cooperation could be enhanced if we can persuade groups to focus more on the interests they hold in common, including overcoming stagnating and declining real incomes that relate to changes in the global economy, Wilson argues. He advocates a cross-race, class-based alliance of working-and middle-class Americans to pursue policies that will deal with the eroding strength of the nation's equalizing institutions, including public education, unions, and political structures that promote the interests of ordinary families.
In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world. In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In "Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth," this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. With its attention to the Ojibwe language, customs, and history, this unique collection of riveting stories illuminates the very nature of storytelling. The Dance Boots narrates a century's evolution of Native Americans making choices and compromises, often dictated by a white majority, as they try to balance survival, tribal traditions, and obligations to future generations.
African Americans grappled with Jim Crow segregation until it was legally overturned in the 1960s. In subsequent decades, the country witnessed a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America--forever changing the face of American society and making it more racially diverse than ever before. In The Diversity Paradox, authors Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean take these two poles of American collective identity--the legacy of slavery and immigration--and ask if today's immigrants are destined to become racialized minorities akin to African Americans or if their incorporation into U.S. society will more closely resemble that of their European predecessors. They also tackle the vexing question of whether America's new racial diversity is helping to erode the tenacious black/white color line. The Diversity Paradox uses population-based analyses and in-depth interviews to examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Lee and Bean analyze where the color line--and the economic and social advantage it demarcates--is drawn today and on what side these new arrivals fall. They show that Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry are not constrained by strict racial categories. Racial status often shifts according to situation. Individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines or as white, and their decisions are rarely questioned by outsiders or institutions. These groups also intermarry at higher rates, which is viewed as part of the process of becoming "American" and a form of upward social mobility. African Americans, in contrast, intermarry at significantly lower rates than Asians and Latinos. Further, multiracial blacks often choose not to identify as such and are typically perceived as being black only--underscoring the stigma attached to being African American and the entrenchment of the "one-drop" rule. Asians and Latinos are successfully disengaging their national origins from the concept of race--like European immigrants before them--and these patterns are most evident in racially diverse parts of the country. For the first time in 2000, the U.S. Census enabled multiracial Americans to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race. Eight years later, multiracial Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. For many, these events give credibility to the claim that the death knell has been sounded for institutionalized racial exclusion.
Japanese has a term that covers both green and blue. Russian has separate terms for dark and light blue. Does this mean that Russians perceive these colors differently from Japanese people? Does language control and limit the way we think, such that each language gives its speakers a different 'worldview?' This opinionated book addresses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the language we speak shapes the way we perceive the world. Linguist John McWhorter argues that while this idea is mesmerizing, it is plainly wrong ... McWhorter shows not only how the idea of language as a lens fails but also why we want so badly to believe it: we're eager to celebrate diversity by acknowledging the intelligence of peoples who may not think like we do. Though well-intentioned, our belief in this idea poses an obstacle to a better understanding of human nature and even trivializes the people we seek to celebrate. The reality--that all humans think alike--provides another, better way for us to acknowledge the intelligence of all peoples.
In 1954 the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education; ten years later, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act. These monumental changes in American law dramatically expanded educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minority children across the country. They also changed the experiences of white children, who have learned in increasingly diverse classrooms. The authors of this commemorative volume include leading scholars in law, education, and public policy, as well as important historical figures. Taken together, the chapters trace the narrative arc of school desegregation in the United States, beginning in California in the 1940s, continuing through Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, and three important Supreme Court decisions about school desegregation and voluntary integration in 1974, 1995, and 2007. The authors also assess the status of racial and ethnic equality in education today and consider the viability of future legal and policy reform in pursuit of the goals of Brown v. Board. This remarkable collection of voices in conversation with one another lays the groundwork for future discussions about the relationship between law and educational equality, and ultimately for the creation of new public policy. A valuable reference for scholars and students alike, this dynamic text is an important contribution to the literature by an outstanding group of authors.
The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.
The divide over race is usually framed as one over Black and White. Sociologist Eileen O'Brien is interested in that middle terrain, what sits in the ever-increasing gray area she dubbed the racial middle. The Racial Middle, tells the story of the other racial and ethnic groups in America, mainly Latinos and Asian Americans, two of the largest and fastest-growing minorities in the United States. Using dozens of in-depth interviews with people of various ethnic and generational backgrounds, Eileen O'Brien challenges the notion that, to fit into American culture, the only options available to Latinos and Asian Americans are either to become white or to become brown. Instead, she offers a wholly unique analysis of Latinos and Asian Americans own distinctive experiences--those that aren't typically White nor Black. Though living alongside Whites and Blacks certainly frames some of their own identities and interpretations of race, O'Brien keenly observes that these groups struggles with discrimination, their perceived isolation from members of other races, and even how they define racial justice, are all significant realities that inform their daily lives and, importantly, influence their opportunities for advancement in society. A refreshing and lively approach to understanding race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century, The Racial Middle gives voice to Latinos and Asian-Americans place in this country's increasingly complex racial mosaic.
Whether through affirmative housing policies or mandatory legislation, there have been numerous efforts to integrate America's neighborhoods, especially the historically white, affluent suburbs. Though much of suburbia has rejected such measures out of a fear of losing their communities to an influx of low-income, inner-city, and primarily African American residents, several metropolitan areas have been successful in creating greater racial diversity. W. Dennis Keating documents the desirability, feasibility, and legality of implementing housing diversity policies in the suburbs. At the heart of this book is the troubling dilemma that the private housing market will inevitably resist race-conscious policies that can be effective only if embraced and supported by individual home buyers and renters, politicians, realtors, financial institutions, and insurers. In the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area, pro-integrative policies have resulted in some examples of long-term racial diversity, particularly in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. Keating compares Cleveland's suburbs to suburbs around the country that have both failed and succeeded in reducing housing discrimination. While there have been occasional fair housing victories over the last three decades, Keating's analysis points toward strategies for greater progress in the future.
Treasured in the Arab-American literary community, Through and Through is a collection of broadly interrelated stories, eight originally published in 1990 with three new stories added in the second edition. One of the first books of modern Arab-American fiction, Joseph Geha's stories offer a warm, inspired portrait of an extended Arab family in a Lebanese and Syrian community in Toledo, Ohio, spanning the decades between the 1930s and the present. In a series of vignettes, Geha follows three generations of an Arab-American family as they create a new community and way of life, struggling to keep their Arab roots vital while adapting their culture to new conditions. In "Holy Toledo" Nadia, "a tomboy in her dungarees" watches American women come into her town to shop. Although she calls them silly, she "wished that she were one of them, returning with them into that huge strangeness, America, luring her despite the threat it seemed to hold of loss and vicious homesickness." Portraying both the anguish and the humor of negotiating between the old world and the new, these stories offer a passionate, unvarnished glimpse into the lives of an immigrant community."
There is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their gender identities. Only recently have sex and gender been thought of as separate concepts, and we have learned that sex (traditionally thought of as physical orbiological) is as variable as gender (traditionally thought of as social).While trans people share many common experiences, there is immense diversity within trans communities. There are an estimated 700,000 transgendered individuals in the US and 15 million worldwide. Even still, there's been a notable lack of organized information for this sizable group.Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource - a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender or genderqueer authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written for and by women, Trans Bodies,Trans Selves is widely accessible to the transgender population, providing authoritative information in an inclusive and respectful way and representing the collective knowledge base of dozens of influential experts. Each chapter takes the reader through an important transgender issue, such as race,religion, employment, medical and surgical transition, mental health topics, relationships, sexuality, parenthood, arts and culture, and many more.Anonymous quotes and testimonials from transgender people who have been surveyed about their experiences are woven throughout, adding compelling, personal voices to every page. In this unique way, hundreds of viewpoints from throughout the community have united to create this strong and pioneeringbook. It is a welcoming place for transgender and gender-questioning people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life.
Diversity matters. Whether in the context of ecosystems, education, the workplace, or politics, diversity is now recognized as a fact and as something to be positively affirmed. But what is the value of diversity? What explains its increasing significance? Valuing Diversity is a groundbreaking response to these questions and to the contemporary global dynamics that make them so salient. Peter D. Hershock examines the changes of the last century to show how the successes of Western-style modernity and industrially-powered markets have, ironically, coupled progressive integration and interdependence with the proliferation of political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental differences. Global predicaments like climate change and persistent wealth inequalities compel recognition that we are in the midst of an era-defining shift from the primacy of the technical to that of the ethical. Yet, neither modern liberalism nor its postmodern critiques have offered the resources needed to address such challenges. Making use of Buddhist and ecological insights, Valuing Diversity develops a qualitatively rich conception of diversity as an emerging value and global relational commons, forwarding an ethics of interdependence and responsive virtuosity that opens prospects for a paradigm shift in our pursuits of equity, freedom, and democratic justice.
Violence against lesbians and gay men has increasingly captured media and scholarly attention. But these reports tend to focus on one segment of the LGBT community--white, middle class men--and largely ignore that part of the community that arguably suffers a larger share of the violence--racial minorities, the poor, and women. In Violence against Queer People, sociologist Doug Meyer offers the first investigation of anti-queer violence that focuses on the role played by race, class, and gender. Drawing on interviews with forty-seven victims of violence, Meyer shows that LGBT people encounter significantly different forms of violence--and perceive that violence quite differently--based on their race, class, and gender. His research highlights the extent to which other forms of discrimination--including racism and sexism--shape LGBT people's experience of abuse. He reports, for instance, that lesbian and transgender women often described violent incidents in which a sexual or a misogynistic component was introduced, and that LGBT people of color sometimes weren't sure if anti-queer violence was based solely on their sexuality or whether racism or sexism had also played a role. Meyer observes that given the many differences in how anti-queer violence is experienced, the present media focus on white, middle-class victims greatly oversimplifies and distorts the nature of anti-queer violence. In fact, attempts to reduce anti-queer violence that ignore race, class, and gender run the risk of helping only the most privileged gay subjects. Many feel that the struggle for gay rights has largely been accomplished and the tide of history has swung in favor of LGBT equality. Violence against Queer People, on the contrary, argues that the lives of many LGBT people--particularly the most vulnerable--have improved very little, if at all, over the past thirty years.
"THE SMARTEST BOOK OF THE YEAR" (THE WASHINGTON POST) In these provocative, powerful essays acclaimed writer/journalist Jeff Chang (Can't Stop Won't Stop, Who We Be) takes an incisive and wide-ranging look at the recent tragedies and widespread protests that have shaken the country. Through deep reporting with key activists and thinkers, passionately personal writing, and distinguished cultural criticism,We Gon' Be Alright links #BlackLivesMatter to #OscarsSoWhite, Ferguson to Washington D.C., the Great Migration to resurgent nativism. Chang explores the rise and fall of the idea of "diversity," the roots of student protest, changing ideas about Asian Americanness, and the impact of a century of racial separation in housing. He argues that resegregation is the unexamined condition of our time, the undoing of which is key to moving the nation forward to racial justice and cultural equity.
The cultural and organizational contexts of race, religion, and higher education -- Changing a culture: IVCF decides to make race matter -- Pursuing common goals: building congruence between race and faith -- "Man, this is hard": the possibilities and perils of interracial friendship -- Shifting strategies: going ethnic-specific -- When race goes on the backburner: IVCF loses diversity -- When a minority is the majority: Asian Americans in IVCF -- Renewing a commitment: realigning values, structures, and practice. Julie J. Park examines how losing racial diversity in a university affects the everyday lives of its students. She uses a student organization, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at "California University," as a case study to show how reductions in racial diversity impact the ability of students to sustain multiethnic communities.
An award-winning author chronicles the story of the women's suffrage movement in America, using compelling period photographs--including some never before published--to illustrate the vivid narrative. This photo-illustrated history tells how women fought for and won the right to vote in the United States. The book starts with basic history on the struggle for women's rights, other groups' battles for the vote, and background on the 19th-century women's suffrage movement before focusing on the ultimately successful 20th-century efforts to enfranchise women. It details and illustrates the political lobbying and public protests as well as the backlash against these efforts, including intimidation, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding of prisoners. Carrying cloth banners and with determined spirits, suffragists marched, picketed, and paraded tirelessly until they were heard and their rights were inscribed into the Constitution.
Why do white supremacist politics in America remain so powerful? Elizabeth Gillespie McRae argues that the answer lies with white women. Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Without these mundane, everyday acts, white supremacist politics could not have shaped local, regional, and national politics the way it did or lasted as long as it has. With white women at the center of the story, the rise of postwar conservatism looks very different than the male-dominated narratives of the resistance to Civil Rights. Women like Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker publicized threats to their Jim Crow world through political organizing, private correspondence, and journalism. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown decision and persisted past the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti-busing protests.
The year 2020 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment giving many women in the United States the right to vote. The struggle for suffrage lasted over six decades and involved more than a million women; yet, even at the moment of the amendment's enactment, women's activists disagreed heartily over how much had been achieved, whether it was necessary for women to continue organizing for political rights, and what those political rights would bring. Looking forward to the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, this collection of original essays takes a long view of the past century of women's political engagement to gauge how much women have achieved in the political arena. The volume looks back at the decades since women won the right to vote to analyze the changes, developments, and even continuities in women's roles in the broad political sphere. Ultimately, the book asks two important questions about the last 100 years of women's suffrage: 1) How did the Nineteenth Amendment alter the American political system? and 2) How has women's engagement in politics changed over the last 100 years? As the chapters reveal, while women have made substantial strides in the political realm--voting at higher rates than men and gaining prominent leadership roles--barriers to gender equality remain. Women continue to be underrepresented in political office and to confront gender bias in a myriad of political settings.
The fourth edition of this widely-acclaimed anthology integrates the best of recent scholarship in women's history with American history as a whole. Now updated to include many more selections on ethnicity, as well as work on the frontier, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Vietnam,prostitution and sex workers, and the problem of eating disorders, this edition is more timely than ever, providing a comprehensive and insightful analysis of women's American history from colonial times to the present. Over seventy-five essays and documents--ranging from a letter written by a slavewoman to an analysis of contemporary feminism--guide the student to an understanding of the interaction of race, ethnicity, class, and gender throughout American history. With its wealth of primary and secondary source material, concise headnotes, and clear, chronological organization, this newedition of Women's America shows with new force and vigor why gender has become a powerful analytical device for understanding the history of the United States.
The United States of America is almost 250 years old, but American women won the right to vote less than a hundred years ago. And when the controversial nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution-the one granting suffrage to women-was finally ratified in 1920, it passed by a mere one-vote margin. The amendment only succeeded because a courageous group of women had been relentlessly demanding the right to vote for more than seventy years. The leaders of the suffrage movement are heroes who were fearless in the face of ridicule, arrest, imprisonment, and even torture. Many of them devoted themselves to the cause knowing they wouldn't live to cast a ballot. The story of women's suffrage is epic, frustrating, and as complex as the women who fought for it. Illustrated with portraits, period cartoons, and other images, Roses and Radicals celebrates this captivating yet overlooked piece of American history and the women who made it happen.
Brief illustrated articles profile significant women in American history, including Abigail Adams, Molly Pitcher, and Nellie Bly.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency was a devastating blow to marginalised people around the country - immigrants, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, and black Americans. Intersecting with every one of those groups were women, who despaired over the halt in progress of their rights as equal citizens. Adding insult to injury, women had to watch one of the most qualified candidates in history, Hillary Clinton, lose to an inexperienced reality TV star who bragged about sexually assaulting women. Has the country become more misogynist, or simply shown its true face? When 53 percent of white women voted for Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary, can we even speak about "women" as a cohesive group? In the face of these challenges, how can we work together to persist, resist, and enact lasting change?Contributors include Cheryl Strayed, Rebecca Solnit, Jessica Valenti, Katha Pollitt, Samantha Irby, and Nicole Chung, among others.
Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions. They go on to explain several anomalies of modern gender politics: why women vote differently from men; why women are better represented in the workforce in the United States than in other countries but less well represented in politics; why men share more of the household work in some countries than in others; and why some countries have such low fertility rates. The first book to integrate the micro-level of families with the macro-level of national institutions, Women, Work, and Politics presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality.
The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II--a "prodigiously researched and engrossing" (New York Times) book that "shines a light on a hidden chapter of American history" (Denver Post). Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.
This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.
The dramatized story of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, leaders of the suffragist women who fought for the passage of the 19th Amendment. They broke from the mainstream women's rights movement to create a more activist wing, daring to push the boundaries to secure women's voting rights in 1920.
Looking beyond the national leadership of the suffrage movement, an acclaimed historian gives voice to the thousands of women from different backgrounds, races, and religions whose local passion and protest resounded throughout the land. For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship. Ware tells her story through the lives of nineteen activists, most of whom have long been overlooked. We meet Mary Church Terrell, a multilingual African American woman; Rose Schneiderman, a labor activist building coalitions on New York's Lower East Side; Claiborne Catlin, who toured the Massachusetts countryside on horseback to drum up support for the cause; Mary Johnston, an aristocratic novelist bucking the Southern ruling elite; Emmeline W. Wells, a Mormon woman in a polygamous marriage determined to make her voice heard; and others who helped harness a groundswell of popular support. We also see the many places where the suffrage movement unfolded--in church parlors, meeting rooms, and the halls of Congress, but also on college campuses and even at the top of Mount Rainier. Few corners of the United States were untouched by suffrage activism.
Judy Monroe provides a profile of the people behind the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment guaranteed women, who were never really considered when the Constitution was originally drafted, the right to vote. This book presents personal stories of suffragist leaders who helped to make this amendment a part of our Constitution.
The first major comparative analysis of parenthood in politics, Mothers and Others brings together leading scholars of gender and politics to discuss the role of parental status in political life. Examining three main areas of citizen engagement within the political system - parenthood and political careers, parenthood and the media, and parenthood and political behaviour - they argue that being a parent is a gendered identity that influences how, why, and to what extent women (and men) engage with politics. This raises important questions about how career politicians, voters, and the media navigate the intersection of gender, parental status, and politics.
A Lab of One's Own describes the experiences of some extraordinary but sadly neglected scientific women who tasted independence, responsibility, and excitement in World War One. Understanding the past is crucial for improving the future, and Patricia Fara examines how inherited prejudicescontinue to limit women's scientific opportunities.Suffragists aligned themselves with scientific and technological progress. Defying arguments about intellectual inferiority and child-bearing responsibilities, during the War they won support by mobilising women to enter conventionally male domains, including science, industry, medicine, and themilitary.A Lab of One's Own reveals these women's stories, celebrating successes and analysing setbacks. In 1919, the suffragist Millicent Fawcett declared triumphantly that "The war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs, and left them free." She was wrong: although women hadhelped the country to victory and won the vote for those over thirty, they had lost the battle for equality. Men returning from the Front reclaimed their jobs, and conventional hierarchies were re-established - although now the nation knew that women were fully capable of performing worktraditionally reserved for men.
The presence of women in Congress is at an all-time high -- approximately one of every five members is female -- and record numbers of women are running for public office for the 2018 midterms. At the same time, Congress is more polarized than ever, and little research exists on how women in Congress view their experiences and contributions to American politics today. Drawing on personal interviews with over three-quarters of the women serving in the 114th Congress (2015-17), the authors analyze how these women navigate today's stark partisan divisions, and whether they feel effective in their jobs. Through first-person perspectives, A Seat at the Table looks at what motivates these women's legislative priorities and behavior, details the ways in which women experience service within a male-dominated institution, and highlights why it matters that women sit in the nation's federal legislative chambers. It describes the strategies women employ to overcome any challenges they confront as well as the opportunities available to them. The book examines how gender interacts with political party, race and ethnicity, seniority, chamber, and district characteristics to shape women's representational influence and behavior, finding that party and race/ethnicity are the two most complicating factors to a singular narrative of women's congressional representation.
Because scholars have traditionally examined the efforts of American suffragists only in relation to electoral politics, the history books have largely missed the real story of what these women achieved far outside the realm of voting reform. Though Stanton, Anthony, and Mott are the best known figures of the woman's suffrage movement, all were dead more than a decade before women actually achieved the vote. Women like Alice Paul, Louisine Havemeyer, and Mary Church Terrell carried on their work, putting their campaign experiences to work long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. This book tells the story of how these women made an indelible mark on American history in fields ranging from education to art, science, publishing, and social activism.
Presents the history of women's suffrage in the United States through the dramatic, often turbulent friendship of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony. Part 1 covers the years from their youth up to the establishment of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. Part 2 spans the period from 1868 to the passage in 1919 of the 19th amendment to the Constitution which gave women the vote.
At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer's Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women's relationship to power--and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template. With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren't perceived to be within the structure of power, isn't it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?
An unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to the present. nbsp; In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, here are more than 250 female writers, including the famous--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison, among others--and the little known, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter integrates women's contributions into our nation's literary heritage with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place.
Looking at general trends and specific items such as life in a tenement, women working overseas in World War I, the production of cosmetics in the 1920s, and new female immigration, this atlas portrays the history of American women from a vivid geographical and demographic perspective. In a variety of colorful maps and charts, this important new work documents milestones in the evolution of the social and political rights of women. Coverage includes the rise of reform movements such as temperance, women's suffrage, and abolition during the 19th century, and contraception, abortion rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 20th.
Speaking of cabinet appointments he'd made as governor, presidential candidate Mitt Romney famously spoke of having "whole binders full of women" to consider. The line was much mocked; and yet, Kaitlin Sidorsky suggests, it raises a point long overlooked in discussions of the gender gap in politics: many more women are appointed, rather than elected, to political office. Analyzing an original survey of political appointments at all levels of state government, All Roads Lead to Power offers an expanded, more nuanced view of women in politics. This book also questions the manner in which political ambition, particularly among women, is typically studied and understood. In a deep comparative analysis of appointed and elected state positions, All Roads Lead to Power highlights how the differences between being appointed or elected explain why so many more women serve in appointed offices. These women, Sidorsky finds, are not always victims of a much-cited lack of self-confidence or ambition, or of a biased political sphere. More often, they make a conscious decision to enter politics through what they believe is a far less partisan and negative entry point. Furthermore, Sidorsky's research reveals that many women end up in political appointments--at all levels--not because they are ambitious to hold public office, but because the work connects with their personal lives or careers. With its groundbreaking research and insights into the ambitions, recruitment, and motivations of appointed officials, Sidorsky's work broadens our conception of political representation and alters our understanding of how and why women pursue and achieve political power.
The fourth edition of Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2016 elections. This timely, yet enduring, volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important development for women as voters and candidates in the 2016 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways in which gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidacies, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the political involvement of Latinas, the participation of African American women, the support of political parties and women's organizations, candidate communications with voters, and state elections. Without question, Gender and Elections is the most comprehensive, reliable, and trustworthy resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.
Companion book to the PBS American Experience documentary by the same name, this anthology is the most comprehensive collection of writings -- contemporary and historical -- on the woman suffrage movement in America. It includes essays by the most prominent contemporary historians, many who challenge widely accepted theories and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the fight for the 19th Amendment.
If women don't have more children, we'll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care - especially in the US - and with insufficient male participation, women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike. In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realised the potential of their bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.
This ambitious volume brings together original essays on the U.S. women's movement with analyses of women's movements in other countries around the world. A comparative perspective and a common theme--feminism in social movement action--unite these voices in a way that will excite students and inspire further research. From the grassroots to the global, the significance of the U.S women's movement in the international arena cannot be denied. At the same time, the way in which international feminism has developed--in Asia, in Latin America, in Europe--has altered and expanded the landscape of the U.S. women's movement forever. These distinguished authors show us how. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Socrates. Virgil. Sir Francis Bacon. The philosophers of Ancient Greece, the poets of Ancient Rome, and the essayists of late English Renaissance were men acknowledged as the great thinkers of their day. Later, men like Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Paine, and scores of others joined the prestigious circle of intellectual elites. While over time, the concept of the great thinker has evolved and redefined itself, it has not evolved to formally include women in its exclusive circle of members. Conspicuously absent are the names of female "great thinkers" in intellectual studies-despite the skyrocketing interest in the American intellectual and the contribution by women to America's social and intellectual development. So, then, what does it mean to be an American woman intellectual in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries? How were/are women able to surmount the restrictive roles dictated by their respective societies? How have time and history silenced the contributions made by some women to the development of intellectual history? Voices Unbound: The Lives and Works of Twelve American Women Intellectuals addresses these questions.
Although the United States ranks sixtieth internationally in women's political leadership, in 2004, a record nine women held governorships, sixty women served as House members with an additional three women elected as delegates from Washington, D.C., Guam, and the Virgin Islands, and fourteen women occupied Senate seats. How have these women managed to beat the odds in their successful attempts to enter national politics? How do they fruitfully participate in the political process once they gain entry into the sacred halls of Congress and the state house? Women's Political Discourse profiles women in the most highly visible political offices today, highlighting their communication strategies. Following an engaging overview of women's political discourse from the early twentieth century, the book features selected women governors, representatives, and senators of the past several decades, from Jeannette Rankin_the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives_to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The authors compare women's and men's political communication techniques and include helpful lists of the women governmental leaders of the twentieth and the twenty-first century. Exploring women's unique approaches to governing, Women's Political Discourse seeks to lay out innovative approaches to leadership.
Traces the role of American women in history, from the Iroquois matron and Puritan goodwife to the dual-role career woman and mother of the eighties. The author presents a history of American women from the Indian woman of the 16th century to the dual-role career woman and mother of the 1980s.
She couldn't go to college. She couldn't become a politician. She couldn't even vote. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't let that stop her. She called on women across the nation to stand together and demand to be treated as equal to men-and that included the right to vote. It took nearly seventy-five years and generations of women fighting for their rights through words, through action, and through pure determination . . . for things to slowly begin to change. With the help of these trailblazers' own words, Doreen Rappaport's engaging text, brought to life by Matt Faulkner's vibrant illustrations, shows readers just how far this revolution has come, and inspires them to keep it going! Select praise for Doreen Rappaport: Martin's Big Words * 2002 Caldecott Honor Book * 2002 Coretta Scott King Honor Book * Child Magazine Best Book of 2001 * New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Children's Book of 2001 * "A stunning, reverent tribute." -School Library Journal, starred review Abe's Honest Words * "Exceptional art, along with Rappaport's and Lincoln's words, makes this a fine celebration of a man who needs little introduction." -Booklist, starred review Eleanor, Quiet No More * "Once again Rappaport celebrates a noble, heroic life in powerful, succinct prose, with prominent, well-chosen, and judiciously placed quotes that both instruct and inspire...Celebrate women in history and in politics with this picture-book life." -School Library Journal, starred review Helen's Big World * "Stirring and awe-inspiring." -The Horn Book, starred review To Dare Mighty Things *
An elderly African American woman, en route to vote, remembers her family's tumultuous voting history in this picture book publishing in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Lillian, a one-hundred-year-old African American woman, makes a "long haul up a steep hill" to her polling place, she sees more than trees and sky-she sees her family's history. She sees the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and her great-grandfather voting for the first time. She sees her parents trying to register to vote. And she sees herself marching in a protest from Selma to Montgomery. Veteran bestselling picture-book author Jonah Winter and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner Shane W. Evans vividly recall America's battle for civil rights in this lyrical, poignant account of one woman's fierce determination to make it up the hill and make her voice heard.
A 2016 Caldecott Honor Book. Stirring poems and stunning collage illustrations combine to celebrate the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, a champion of equal voting rights. "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." Despite fierce prejudice and abuse, even being beaten to within an inch of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer was a champion of civil rights from the 1950s until her death in 1977. Integral to the Freedom Summer of 1964, Ms. Hamer gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention that, despite President Johnson's interference, aired on national TV news and spurred the nation to support the Freedom Democrats.
The acclaimed civil rights leader Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) is brought vividly to life in this accessible and well-researched biography. Wells was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she helped black women win the right to vote. But what she is most remembered for is the success of her lifelong crusade against the practice of lynching--called by some "our nation's crime"--in the American South. She fought her battle by writing and publishing countless newspaper articles and by speaking around the world. Her outspokenness put her in grave danger many times over, but she would not be silenced, and today she is credited with ending lynching in the United States. Her story is one of courage and determination in the face of intolerance and injustice. AFTERWORD, BIBLIOGRAPHY, INDEX.
What are the voting behaviors of the various minority groups in the United States and how will they shape the elections of tomorrow? This book explores the history of minority voting blocs and their influence on future American elections. According to current scholarship, the Caucasian population of the United States is expected to be a minority by 2042. As the white majority disappears and politics shift with the changing tide, it is important to understand the voting behaviors of the significant minority voting blocs in the United States. In this book, a variety of voting blocs are examined: African Americans, women, Native Americans, Latinos (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans), South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis), East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans), Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, and the LGBT community. In addition to factual and historical information about the minority voting blocs, chapters also explore how Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, felon disenfranchisement laws, and voter ID laws impact a minority group's voting rights. Finally, the authors and contributors anticipate which issues are likely to influence each group's voters and affect future elections.
In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
Black voters can make or break a presidential election--look at the close electoral results in 2000 and the difference the disenfranchised Black vote in Florida alone might have made. Black candidates can influence a presidential election--look at the effect that Jesse Jackson had on the Democratic party, the platform, and the electorate in 1984 and 1988, and the contributions to the Democratic debates that Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton made in 2004. American presidential politics can't get along without the Black vote--witness the controversy over candidates' appearing (or not) at the NAACP convention, or the extent to which candidates court (or not) the Black vote in a variety of venues. It all goes back to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which formally gave African Americans the right to vote, even if after all these years that right is continuously contested. In Freedom Is Not Enough (a quote from Lyndon Johnson's 1965 commencement address to Howard University just before he signed the Voting Rights Act), Ronald W. Walters traces the history of the Black vote since 1965, celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2005, and shows why passing a law is not the same as ensuring its enforcement, legitimacy, and opportunity.
Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: "I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?" It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization, mobilizing black communities and white supporters across the country--but relentlessly targeted by the police and the FBI, and increasingly riven by violence and strife within. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery. Brown's story begins with growing up in an impoverished neighborhood in Philadelphia and attending a predominantly white school, where she first sensed what it meant to be black, female, and poor in America. She describes her political awakening during the bohemian years of her adolescence, and her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers, who seemed to hold the promise of redemption. And she tells of her ascent into the upper echelons of Panther leadership: her tumultuous relationship with the charismatic Huey Newton, who would become her lover and her nemesis; her experience with the male power rituals that would sow the seeds of the party's demise; and the scars that she both suffered and inflicted in that era's paradigm-shifting clashes of sex and power. Stunning, lyrical, and acute, this is the indelible testimony of a black woman's battle to define herself.
Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when, in 1961, the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While thirty percent of the county's residents were black, only twelve black persons were on its voting rolls. United States v. Lynd was the first trial that resulted in the conviction of a southern registrar for contempt of court. The case served as a model for other challenges to voter discrimination in the South, and was an important influence in shaping the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Count Them One by One is a comprehensive account of the groundbreaking case written by one of the Justice Department's trial attorneys. Gordon A. Martin, Jr., then a newly-minted lawyer, traveled to Hattiesburg from Washington to help shape the federal case against Lynd. He met with and prepared the government's sixteen black witnesses who had been refused registration, found white witnesses, and was one of the lawyers during the trial. Decades later, Martin returned to Mississippi and interviewed the still-living witnesses, their children, and friends. Martin intertwines these current reflections with commentary about the case itself. The result is an impassioned, cogent fusion of reportage, oral history, and memoir about a trial that fundamentally reshaped liberty and the South.
Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in the U.S. House of Representatives, was elected in 1968. That was nearly a hundred years after the election of the first African American man to Congress and fifty years after the first woman. A quarter of a century after Chisholm's election, the first Black woman, Carol Moseley-Braun, was elected to the United States Senate. It was not until 1993, when ten additional Black women won seats in the 103rd Congress, that African American women were allowed to serve their country and their constituencies in any substantial numbers. In 1997 that historic moment will very likely be lost as congressional districts are redrawn by court order. This remarkable book by LaVerne Gill preserves the history of the struggles and accomplishments of these fifteen courageous women, and will move others to learn from and follow their example. African American Women in Congress details the life and career histories of Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Yvonne Burke, Cardiss Collins, Katie Hall, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Maxine Waters, Barbara-Rose Collins, Carol Moseley-Braun, Corinne Brown, Carrie Meek, Cynthia McKinney, Eva Clayton, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and Sheila Jackson-Lee. Each profile contains a picture of its subject, interview material, and resumes. Arranged chronologically, the book introduces the reader to issues of vital importance to the Black community--Reconstruction, enfranchisement, lynchings and harassment, civil rights struggles, the founding of advocacy groups, the power of the Congressional Black Caucus, the creation of majority minority districts that allowed greater representation in Congress, the struggle of largely Black Washington, D.C., for representation, and the recent dismantling of past gains by a Republican majority. Gill also describes the uphill battles for social justice and the rights of women that the fifteen women had to wage even within their own political parties, political organizations, and districts. For general readers, high school and college students, and anyone interested in the political process, this book is illuminating and inspiring reading.
The first ever comprehensive oral history of President Obama's administration and the complex political machine that created and powered a landmark American presidency. In this candid oral history of a presidential tenure, author Brian Abrams reveals the behind-the-scenes stories that illuminate the eight years of the Obama White House through more than one hundred exclusive interviews. Among those given a voice in this extraordinary account are Obama's cabinet secretaries; his teams of speechwriters, legal advisers, and campaign strategists; as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who fought for or against his agenda. They recall the early struggles of an idealistic outsider candidate and speak openly about the exacting work that led to cornerstone legislation. They share the failures and dissent that met Obama's efforts and revisit the paths to his accomplishments. As eyewitnesses to history, their accounts combine to deliver an unfiltered view of Obama's battle to deliver on his promise of hope and change. This provocative collage of anecdotes, personal reminiscences, and impressions from confidants and critics not only provides an authoritative window into the events that defined an era but also offers the first published account into the making of the forty-fourth president of the United States--one that history will soon not forget.
The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The basis for the smash Academy Award-nominated film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.
The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. For Colored Girls Who Consider Politics is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years--Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore--a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls. Like many people who have spent their careers in public service, they view their lives in four-year waves where presidential campaigns and elections have been common threads. For most of the Colored Girls, their story starts with Jesse Jackson's first campaign for president. From there, they went on to work on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Over the years, they've filled many roles: in the corporate world, on campaigns, in unions, in churches, in their own businesses and in the White House. Through all of this, they've worked with those who have shaped our country's history--US Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, well-known political figures such as Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean, and legendary activists and historical figures such as Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz.For Colored Girls Who Consider Politics is filled with personal stories that bring to life heroic figures we all know and introduce us to some of those who've worked behind the scenes but are still hidden. Whatever their perch, the Colored Girls are always focused on the larger goal of "hurrying history" so that every American -- regardless of race, gender or religious background -- can have a seat at the table. This is their story.
In this enthralling narrative, Annelise Orleck chronicles the history of the American women's movement from the nineteenth century to the present. Starting with an incisive introduction that calls for a reconceptualization of American feminist history to encompass multiple streams of women's activism, she weaves the personal with the political, vividly evoking the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolutions. In short, thematic chapters, Orleck enables readers to understand the impact of women's activism, and highlights how feminism has flourished through much of the past century within social movements that have too often been treated as completely separate. Showing that women¿s activism has taken many forms, has intersected with issues of class and race, and has continued during periods of backlash, Rethinking American Women¿s Activism is a perfect introduction to the subject for anyone interested in women¿s history and social movements.
In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey--as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell--are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as one of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist--and particularly, black nationalist women's--ferment. In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
As the twentieth century draws to an end, the changing role of women appears as one of the dominant features of the era. In Now Hiring, historian Julia Blackwelder traces the century-long evolution of the American occupational structure and the ensuing rise in demand for female workers through the closing episodes of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of postindustrialism. Decade by decade, she adroitly traces the main lines of the development of the female work force and its interactions with education, family life, and social convention while developing a nuanced analysis of the differential patterns for various ethnic, racial, age, and socioeconomic groups. Through vignettes of individual women, given context by statistical data that place them within larger patterns of work and family life, Blackwelder presents her arguments "with flesh on them." She offers a pioneering consideration of non-paid employment as part of the picture of women and work and incorporates an intriguing case study of the evolution of the Girl Scout organization. Her consideration of the interaction of race, class, gender, and economic forces in the evolving roles of working women--particularly since she weaves these issues into every discussion, rather than isolating them as afterthoughts--also makes an intellectual contribution to the field of women's studies. In her conclusion, Blackwelder summarizes the effects of a century of change in women's employment and delineates the social and economic challenges that will confront women and families of the twenty-first century. Blackwelder portrays the larger economy as the premier driving force for patterns of female work. She demonstrates that the reconfiguration of the women's labor market followed the shift of the leading sector, from agriculture in the nineteenth century to manufacturing and eventually to service industries. In addition, she shows how changes in the labor market redirected female education and transformed family structures in the United States and how these changes in turn contributed to the further restructuring of job opportunities and salary structures. Blackwelder analyzes how gender conventions have affected the employment of women: what industries would hire them, what positions they were considered for, what pay was considered appropriate.
In the glorious, boozy party after the first World War, a new being burst defiantly onto the world stage: the so-called flapper. Young, impetuous, and flirtatious, she was an alluring, controversial figure, celebrated in movies, fiction, plays, and the pages of fashion magazines. But, as this book argues, she didn't appear out of nowhere. This spirited, beautifully illustrated history presents a fresh look at the reality of young women's experiences in America and Britain from the 1890s to the 1920s, when the "modern" girl emerged. Linda Simon shows us how this modern girl bravely created a culture, a look, and a future of her own. Lost Girls is an illuminating history of the iconic flapper as she evolved from a problem to a temptation, and finally, in the 1920s and beyond, to an aspiration.
In this book Jean Matthews chronicles the changing fortunes and transformations of the organized suffrage movement, from its period of declining numbers and campaign failures to its final victory in the Nineteenth Amendment that brought women the vote. She recaptures the personalities and ideas that characterized the movement in these years, drawing portraits and analyzing the intellectual currents--in politics, the economy, sexuality, and social thought--that competed for women's commitment. And she shows how new leadership and new strategies at last brought success in the long struggle that had seen many feminist leaders grow old. The rise of the new woman emphasizes the historical contexts, including progressivism, in which the women's movement operated; the disputes and tensions within the movement itself; and the perennial question of who was to be included and excluded in the quest for women's rights. It also considers the aftereffects of the 1920 constitutional victory, when women found themselves wondering what to do next.
Long overlooked in histories of finance, women played an essential role in areas such as banking and the stock market during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet their presence sparked ongoing controversy. Hetty Green's golden touch brought her millions, but she outraged critics with her rejection of domesticity. Progressives like Victoria Woodhull, meanwhile, saw financial acumen as more important for women than the vote. George Robb's pioneering study sheds a light on the financial methods, accomplishments, and careers of three generations of women. Plumbing sources from stock brokers' ledgers to media coverage, Robb reveals the many ways women invested their capital while exploring their differing sources of information, approaches to finance, interactions with markets, and levels of expertise. He also rediscovers the forgotten women bankers, brokers, and speculators who blazed new trails--and sparked public outcries over women's unsuitability for the predatory rough-and-tumble of market capitalism. Entertaining and vivid with details, Ladies of the Ticker sheds light on the trailblazers who transformed Wall Street into a place for women's work.
Provides users with a detailed and authoritative overview of this event, as well as the principal figures involved in this pivotal episode in U.S. history. "Examines the history of the women's suffrage movement and its impact on American life and society. Features include narrative overview, biographical profiles, primary source documents, detailed chronology, and annotated sources for further study."--Provided by publisher.
This innovative text explores the unprecedented changes in the realms of politics, demography, economics, culture, knowledge, and kinship that women have brought about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Global in reach, the book provides a comparative analysis of developments worldwide to show both progress as well as new tensions and forms of inequality that have emerged out of women's entry into politics, wage employment, education, and the production of culture. Beginning with suffrage and moving to participation in international movements--such as anti-war, labor, and environmental rights activism--Maria Bucur explores how women have transformed the operation of states and international institutions. She focuses on the radical demographic shifts since 1900 through the prism of changing practices in women's sexuality, from birth control practices to education. Examining the continuing economic gender gap around the world, Bucur highlights ways women have been both beneficiaries of new economic opportunities and participants in developing new forms of inequality. Considering the remarkable achievements of women in the areas of knowledge making and cultural production, the author shifts her gaze toward the future and what these changes mean in terms of gender norms and evolving kinship relations. She thus presents a new perspective on contemporary world history, centered on how women have become both the subjects and objects of seismic shifts in the political, social, and economic structures of societies across the globe.
Documents the 72-year struggle for women's suffrage which culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. It illuminates the alliances, infighting, betrayals and defeats that paved the way for victory in the battle for women's right to vote. Historical footage is enhanced with vocal performances, and interviews with historians provide the viewer with both current and historical perspectives.
"Dolley Madison lived through two wars, knew the first twelve Presidents, and watched America evolve from a struggling young republic to the first modern democracy in the world. At a time when women could neither vote nor participate officially in politics, Dolley Madison, wife of the fourth president James Madison, became one of the most influential and best loved figures of her day. When she died in 1849 at the age of 81-- one of the last remaining members of the founding generation--Washington City honored her with the largest state funeral the capital had ever seen"--Container.
Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women's movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that dramatically rewrites a century of American women's history. Also challenging the contemporary "lean-in," trickle-down feminist philosophy and asserting that women's histories all too often depoliticize politics, labor issues, and divergent economic circumstances, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry demonstrate that the post-Suffrage women's movement focused on exploitation of women in the workplace as well as on inherent sexual rights. The authors carefully revise our "wave" vision of feminism, which previously suggested that there were clear breaks and sharp divisions within these media-driven "waves." Showing how history books have obscured the notable activism by working-class and minority women in the past, Feminism Unfinished provides a much-needed corrective.
Young feminists today are becoming activists on behalf of many causes beyond the classic--and indispensable--feminist ones of reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work. In The Fire This Time, Dawn Martin, one of four founders of The Third Wave Foundation--a multiracial, multi-issue, and multicultural activist organization--and Vivien Labaton, its first executive director, offer an exciting cross section of feminist voices that express new directions in activism, identity, and thought. Ayana Bird dissects the role of black women in hip-hop; Joshua Breitbart and Ana Noguiera demonstrate how Indimedia can break the hold of the corporate media over the news; and Jennifer Bleyer reviews the exhilarating power unleashed by the GirlZine movement. Anna Kirkland's analysis of transsexual and transgendered people and the law is deeply thoughtful, and Shireen Lee's piece on women, technology, and feminism envisions empowering prospects for women.. Ranging from media and culture to politics and globalization, The Fire This Time is a call to new frontiers of activism, and helps reinvent feminism for a new generation.
New York Times Bestseller “Sharp and prescient… The appeal of Valenti’s memoir lies in her ability to trace objectification through her own life, and to trace what was for a long time her own obliviousness to it…Sex Object is an antidote to the fun and flirty feminism of selfies and self-help.” – New Republic Hailed by the Washington Post as “one of the most visible and successful feminists of her generation,” Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a memoir that Publishers Weekly calls “bold and unflinching,” Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes on women’s lives, from the everyday to the existential. From subway gropings and imposter syndrome to sexual awakenings and motherhood, Sex Object reveals the painful, embarrassing, and sometimes illegal moments that shaped Valenti’s adolescence and young adulthood in New York City. In the tradition of writers like Joan Didion and Mary Karr, Sex Object is a profoundly moving tour de force that is bound to shock those already familiar with Valenti’s work, and enthrall those who are just finding it.
A powerful indictment from within of the current state of feminism, and a passionate call to arms From Lilith Fair to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the WNBA--everywhere you look, girl culture is clearly ascendant. Young women live by feminism's goals, yet feminism itself is undeniably at a crossroads; "girl power" feminists appear to be obsessed with personal empowerment at the expense of politics while political institutions such as Ms. and NOW are so battle weary they've lost their ability to speak to a new generation. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards show the snags in each feminist hub--from the dissolution of riot grrrls into the likes of the Spice Girls, to older women's hawking of young girls' imperiled self-esteem, to the hyped hatred of feminist thorns like Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf--and prove that these snags have not, in fact, torn feminism asunder. In an intelligent and incendiary argument, Baumgardner and Richards address issues instead of feelings and the political as well as the personal. They describe the seven deadly sins the media commits against feminism, provide keys to accessible and urgent activism, discuss why the ERA is still a relevant and crucial political goal, and spell out what a world with equality would look like. They apply Third Wave confidence to Second Wave consciousness, all the while maintaining that the answer to feminism's problems is still feminism.
There once was a time when the concept of equal pay for equal work did not exist, when women of all ages were "girls," when abortion was a back-alley procedure, when there was no such thing as a rape crisis center or a shelter for battered women, when "sexual harassment" had not yet been named and defined. "If conditions are right," Susan Brownmiller says in this stunning memoir, "if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation." In Our Time tells the story of that transformation, as only Brownmiller can. A leading feminist activist and the author of Against Our Will, the book that changed the nation's perception of rape, she now brings the Women's Liberation movement and its passionate history vividly to life. Here is the colorful cast of characters on whose shoulders we stand--the feminist icons Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem, and the lesser known women whose contributions to change were equally profound. And here are the landmark events of the era: the consciousness-raising groups that sprung up in people's living rooms, the mimeographed position papers that first articulated the new thinking, the abortion and rape speak-outs, the daring sit-ins, the underground newspaper collectives, and the inventive lawsuits that all played a role in the most wide-reaching revolution of the twentieth century. Here as well are Brownmiller's reflections on the feminist utopian vision, and her dramatic accounts, rendered with honesty and humor, of the movement's painful internal schisms as it struggled to give voice to the aspirarations of all women. Finally, Brownmiller addresses that most relevant question: What is the legacy of feminism today?
Feminism has hit the big time. Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, feminist" has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers, and multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyoncé. It drives advertising and marketing campaigns for everything from wireless plans to underwear to perfume, presenting what's long been a movement for social justice as just another consumer choice in a vast market. Individual self-actualization is the goal, shopping more often than not the means, and celebrities the mouthpieces.But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism's splashy arrival at the centre of today's media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn't offered solutions to the movement's unfinished business. Planned Parenthood is under sustained attack, women are still paid 77 percent,or less,of the man's dollar, and vicious attacks on women, both on- and offline, are utterly routine.Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years' experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been co-opted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend. Surveying movies, television, advertising, fashion, and more, Zeisler reveals a media landscape brimming with the language of empowerment, but offering little in the way of transformational change. Witty, fearless, and unflinching, We Were Feminists Once is the story of how we let this happen, and how we can amplify feminism's real purpose and power.
"No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark." --Naomi Wolf Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, and going on to become a bestseller,The Dialectic of Sexwas the first book of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics. Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction--for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning women's squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity,The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to today's society--a testament to Shulamith Firestone's startlingly prescient vision. Firestone died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American "settler complicities" and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
This study of feminist labor reform examines how working women pursued equality by claiming new identities for themselves as citizens and as breadwinners. Lara Vapnek tells the story of American labor feminism from the end of the Civil War through the winning of woman suffrage rights, a period in which working women in the nation's industrializing cities launched a series of campaigns to gain economic equality and political power. Focusing particularly on disjunctions between middle-class and working-class women's notions of independence, Vapnek highlights the specific contributions of reformers such as Jennie Collins, Leonora O'Reilly, and Helen Campbell, and organizations such as the National Consumers' League, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the Women's Trade Union League. Locating households as important sites of class conflict, Breadwinners recovers the class and gender politics behind the marginalization of domestic workers in debates over labor reform while documenting the ways in which working-class women raised their voices on their own behalf.
It is more than fifty years since Betty Friedan diagnosed malaise among suburban housewives and the National Organization of Women was founded. Across the decades, the feminist movement brought about significant progress on workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, and sexual assault. Yet, the proverbial million-dollar question remains: why is there still so much to be done? With this book, Lynn S. Chancer takes stock of the American feminist movement and engages with a new burst of feminist activism. She articulates four common causes--advancing political and economic equality, allowing intimate and sexual freedom, ending violence against women, and expanding the cultural representation of women--considering each in turn to assess what has been gained (or not). It is around these shared concerns, Chancer argues, that we can continue to build a vibrant and expansive feminist movement. After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism takes the long view of the successes and shortcomings of feminism(s). Chancer articulates a broad agenda developed through advancing intersectional concerns about class, race, and sexuality. She advocates ways to reduce the divisiveness that too frequently emphasizes points of disagreement over shared aims. And she offers a vision of individual and social life that does not separate the "personal" from the "political." Ultimately, this book is about not only redressing problems, but also reasserting a future for feminism and its enduring ability to change the world.
Working Women in America: Split Dreams examines the diversity of women's work experiences from pre-industrial times to the twentieth century. One of the book's main themes is the continuity of women's work experience. It highlights that women have worked throughout history, and it seeks todispel the misconception that women's work is a recent phenomenon. Another theme which runs through the book is the constant tension and multiple role affiliations that women experience. Indeed, the lives of working women are characterized by "split dreams": most women who work are constantlyjuggling their work and family dreams. Therefore, it is misleading to concentrate solely on the workplace when seeking to understand women's position at work. Rather, one must pay attention to the connections among societal institutions. To this end, the authors argue for and utilize a structuralapproach --one that examines the ways in which the economy, education, the family, and the polity reflect and influence one another and help reinforce women's subordination. Only when these connections are brought to light, is it possible to begin to formulate alternatives to conventional ideasconcerning work, family, and gender roles. Only then, can we begin to alter our world in such a way that the work and family lives of women and men are not "split" but rather satisfactorily integrated in day-to-day reality.The authors begin by situating their research in opposition to dominant sociological models of work and highlight the political dimensions inherent in knowledge-building. Recognizing that the present is to a large extent a legacy of the past, the authors provide a thorough historical overview ofwomen at work. In doing so, they are careful to examine the diversity of women's experiences by race, ethnicity, class, and age. The economic, legal-political, familial, and educational institutions are then analyzed to show the ways in which they help produce and maintain inequality for women inthe workplace. Working Women in America: Split Dreams intersperses first-person accounts throughout the book and provides a number of vignettes of women employed in a variety of occupations. It is an ideal text for courses in women's studies and sociology, as well as for general readers interestedin women and their work.
Women have entered the labor market in unprecedented numbers, yet these critically needed workers still earn less than men and have fewer opportunities for advancement. This study traces the evolution of the female labor force in America, addressing the issue of gender distinction in theworkplace and refuting the notion that women's employment advances were a response to social revolution rather than long-run economic progress. Employing innovative quantitative history methods and new data series on employment, earnings, work experience, discrimination, and hours of work, itestablishes that the present economic status of women evolved gradually over the last two centuries and that past conceptions of women workers persist.
In Gender and the American Presidency: Nine Presidential Women and the Barriers They Faced, Theodore F. Sheckels, Nichola D. Gutgold, and Diana Bartelli Carlin invite the audience to consider women qualified enough to be president and explores reasons why they have been dismissed as presidential contenders. This analysis profiles key presidential contenders including Barbara Mikulski, Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Kassebaum, Kathleen Sebelius, Christine Gregoire, Linda Lingle, Elizabeth Dole, Dianne Feinstein, and Olympia Snowe. Gender barriers, media coverage, communication style, geography, and other factors are examined to determine why these seemingly qualified, powerful politicos failed to win the White House. Watch the authors discuss gender and American politics on CSPAN's BookTV.
This book focuses on gender and civic membership in American constitutional politics from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment through Second Wave Feminism. It examines how American civic membership is gendered, and how the terms of civic membership available to men and women shape their political identities, aspirations, and behavior. The book also explores the dynamics of American constitutional development through a focus on civic membership--a legal and political construct at the heart of the constitutional order.This is a book about gender politics and constitutional development, and about what each of these can tell us about the other. It considers the options and choices faced by women's rights activists in the United States as they voiced their claims for civic inclusion from Reconstruction through Second Wave Feminism, and it makes evident the limits of liberal citizenship for women.
The women's rights movement from the early suffragists to the feminist movement that started in the 1960s. Sullivan presents illustrations and text on the battles waged by women for equal jobs, equal pay, equal representation in government.
In 1964, Joe is pleased that a new law will allow his best friend John Henry, who is black, to share the town pool and other public places with him, but he is dismayed to find that prejudice still exists.
2014 NAACP Image Award Winner- Outstanding Literary Work - Biography / Auto Biography 2013Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians Choice Top 25 Academic Titles for 2013 The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks's politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought-for more than a half a century-to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.
National Bestseller Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin's published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck's film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin's private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America. This edition contains more than 40 black-and-white images from the film.
Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when, in 1961, the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While thirty percent of the county's residents were black, only twelve black persons were on its voting rolls. United States v. Lynd was the first trial that resulted in the conviction of a southern registrar for contempt of court. The case served as a model for other challenges to voter discrimination in the South, and was an important influence in shaping the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Count Them One by One is a comprehensive account of the groundbreaking case written by one of the Justice Department's trial attorneys. Gordon A. Martin, Jr., then a newly-minted lawyer, traveled to Hattiesburg from Washington to help shape the federal case against Lynd. He met with and prepared the government's sixteen black witnesses who had been refused registration, found white witnesses, and was one of the lawyers during the trial. Decades later, Martin returned to Mississippi and interviewed the still-living witnesses, their children, and friends. Martin intertwines these current reflections with commentary about the case itself. The result is an impassioned, cogent fusion of reportage, oral history, and memoir about a trial that fundamentally reshaped liberty and the South.
The first volume of March, a graphic novel trilogy co-authored by Congressman John Lewis (Georgia, 5th District) and Andrew Aydin, with art by Nate Powell is a vivid first-hand account of Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights (including his key roles in the historic 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March) and meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. --- new 02.15.
From the prison farms and lynch mobs of Mississippi to the political intrigue of the African liberation wars, Stokely Carmichael's remarkable life story covers the full range of the black liberation struggle in our time. Carmichael recounts his development from immigrant kid to impassioned activist in his own unmistakeable voice - clear, informed and good humoured. He also reveals his encounters with other freedom fighters. This is a fascinating personal testimony of a supremely committed black freedom fighter and a radical and engaging human being.
Her own powerful story to 1972, told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction, with a 1988 Introduction by the author.
A biography of the schoolteacher who became the first black woman elected to the United States Congress.
The story of civil rights activist John Lewis, inspired to action by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who believed in fighting segregation.
A 2016 Caldecott Honor Book. Stirring poems and stunning collage illustrations combine to celebrate the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, a champion of equal voting rights.
One of the inspirations for Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" (call number E185.615 .C6335 2015). The powerful evocation of a childhood in Harlem that helped to galvanize the early days of the civil rights movement examines the deep consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic.
The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, four hundred and fifty Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement.In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph.Arsenault recounts how a group of volunteers - blacks and whites - came together to travel from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals and putting their lives on the line for racial justice. News photographers captured the violence in Montgomery, shockingthe nation and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration. Here are the key players - their fears and courage, their determination and second thoughts, and the agonizing choices they faced as they took on Jim Crow - and triumphed.Winner of the Owsley PrizePublication is timed to coincide with the airing of the American Experience miniseries documenting the Freedom Rides
Poetry is an ideal artistic medium for expressing the fear, sorrow, and triumph of revolutionary times. Words of Protest, Words of Freedom is the first comprehensive collection of poems written during and in response to the American civil rights struggle of 1955-75. Featuring some of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century--including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott--alongside lesser-known poets, activists, and ordinary citizens, this anthology presents a varied and vibrant set of voices, highlighting the tremendous symbolic reach of the civil rights movement within and beyond the United States. Some of the poems address crucial movement-related events--such as the integration of the Little Rock schools, the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, the emergence of the Black Panther party, and the race riots of the late 1960s--and key figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy. Other poems speak more broadly to the social and political climate of the times. Along with Jeffrey Lamar Coleman's headnotes, the poems recall the heartbreaking and jubilant moments of a tumultuous era. Altogether, more than 150 poems by approximately 100 poets showcase the breadth of the genre of civil rights poetry. Selected contributors. Maya Angelou, W. H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Philip Levine, Audre Lorde, Robert Lowell, Pauli Murray, Huey P. Newton, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Uncovers the often overlooked stories of the women who shaped the black freedom struggle The story of the black freedom struggle in America has been overwhelmingly male-centric, starring leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. With few exceptions, black women have been perceived as supporting actresses; as behind-the-scenes or peripheral activists, or rank and file party members. But what about Vicki Garvin, a Brooklyn-born activist who became a leader of the National Negro Labor Council and guide to Malcolm X on his travels through Africa? What about Shirley Chisholm, the first black Congresswoman? From Rosa Parks and Esther Cooper Jackson, to Shirley Graham DuBois and Assata Shakur, a host of women demonstrated a lifelong commitment to radical change, embracing multiple roles to sustain the movement, founding numerous groups and mentoring younger activists. Helping to create the groundwork and continuity for the movement by operating as local organizers, international mobilizers, and charismatic leaders, the stories of the women profiled in Want to Start a Revolution? help shatter the pervasive and imbalanced image of women on the sidelines of the black freedom struggle. Contributors: Margo Natalie Crawford, Prudence Cumberbatch, Johanna Fernández, Diane C. Fujino, Dayo F. Gore, Joshua Guild, Gerald Horne, Ericka Huggins, Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, Joy James, Erik McDuffie, Premilla Nadasen, Sherie M. Randolph, James Smethurst, Margaret Stevens, and Jeanne Theoharis.
In this Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child's unique perspective to an important chapter in America's history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where whites had and blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining with her family--and thousands of others--in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. Poignant, moving, and hopeful, this is an intimate look at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.
By the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement had been alive for many years and had achieved a fair amount of success in guaranteeing the rights of all Americans to equality and justice. But throughout much of the country, especially in the South, racism still prevailed and African Americans remained unable to vote, driven away from voter registration by complex and arbitrary regulations designed only to deny black voters any power or influence. In 1965, activists, led by Martin Luther King Jr., gathered in Selma, Alabama, where they planned to aggressively protest the voting injustice. Selma was a particularly notorious city, lorded over by racist and authoritarian sheriff Jim Clark. Clark and his allies in Selma, including Alabama governor George Wallace, were determined to stop the civil rights movement and ensure that blacks in Alabama would never have the same rights. Before long, the peaceful marches organized to protest injustice were met with brutal violence, and civil rights activists-men, women, and children gathered from around the country-were beaten, arrested, and sometimes killed. But the savage violence and cruelty was captured by TV cameras and journalists, and before long, the racism and hatred was known throughout America. People all over the nation joined King and those marching in Selma in demanding justice for all, and an end to the hatred that was tearing the country apart. Book jacket.
A riveting account of the civil rights boycott that changed history by the foremost author of history for young people. Now a classic, Freedman's book tells the dramatic stories of the heroes who stood up against segregation and Jim Crow laws in 1950s Alabama. A master of succinct historical narratives, Freeman explains the contributions of and sacrifices made by Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, who refused give up their seats, to Jo Ann Robinson, who began the boycott, to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose leadership was instrumental is carrying it through, and others. Full of eye-witness reports, iconic photographs from the era, and crucial primary sources, this work brings the narratives alive for contemporary readers. A map, source notes, a bibliography, and other backmatter make is a valuable classroom resource. Recipient of an Orbis Pictus Honor, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and the Jane Addams Peace Association Honor Book Award, Freedom Walkers received five starred reviews.
On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidating a key provision of voting rights law. The decision--the culmination of an eight-year battle over the power of Congress to regulate state conduct of elections--marked the closing of a chapter in American politics. That chapter had opened a century earlier in the case of Guinn v. United States, which ushered in national efforts to knock down racial barriers to the ballot. A detailed and timely history, The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act analyzes changing legislation and the future of voting rights in the United States. In tracing the development of the Voting Rights Act from its inception, Charles S. Bullock III, Ronald Keith Gaddie, and Justin J. Wert begin by exploring the political and legal aspects of the Jim Crow electoral regime. Detailing both the subsequent struggle to enact the law and its impact, they explain why the Voting Rights Act was necessary. The authors draw on court cases and election data to bring their discussion to the present with an examination of the 2006 revision and renewal of the act, and its role in shaping the southern political environment in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, when Barack Obama was chosen. Bullock, Gaddie, and Wert go on to closely evaluate the 2013 Shelby County decision, describing how the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court created an appellate environment that made the act ripe for a challenge. Rigorous in its scholarship and thoroughly readable, this book goes beyond history and analysis to provide compelling and much-needed insight into the ways voting rights legislation has shaped the United States. The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act illuminates the historical roots--and the human consequences--of a critical chapter in U.S. legal history.
"The work of David J. Garrow is more than a day-by-day account of how the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 came into being. It is also a skillful analysis of the dynamics of protest activity and more particularly of the ways in which successful protesters deliberately use the mass media to influence uninvolved audiences." -American Historical Review "A valuable book, because it is a reminder of both the heroism and the brutality displayed in the great civil rights crusade." -David Herbert Donald, The New Republic "One of the most comprehensive studies yet of a single campaign within the civil-rights movement." -Pat Watters, New York Times Book Review "An excellent fusion of important theoretical constructs with careful and thoughtful empirical analysis. A desirable addition to most college libraries, useful for a variety of courses....Thoroughly documented. Recommended." -Choice
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 achieved what two constitutional amendments and three civil rights acts could not: giving African Americans in the South access to the ballot free from restriction or intimidation. The most exhaustive treatment of elections and race in the region in sixty years, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South explores the impact of that landmark legislation and highlights lingering concerns about minority political participation. In this state-by-state assessment, Charles S. Bullock III and Ronald Keith Gaddie show how minorities have become politically empowered thanks to the act--particularly its Section 5 provision, which requires jurisdictions that have had low levels of minority voting to obtain federal clearance before altering election laws. Blending data and anecdote, the authors demonstrate how minority participation in politics has improved as measured by voter registration and turnout, election of African Americans to political office, and minorities' success in electing preferred candidates. Eleven southern states are discussed, including Arkansas and Tennessee, where Section 5 was not implemented, and Florida and Texas, where the act takes into account Latino participation. Concluding chapters offer a comparative assessment of voting rights progress across the South, explore the political by-products of the act, and analyze the 2008 election of President Barack Obama in light of wider access to the polls. The authors also discuss whether Section 5, set to expire in 2031, will be needed any longer. Political scientists, historians, students, and all those interested in southern politics and minority voting rights will find this study rich in information and insight as it shows how race and party interact in the modern South.
In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton, creator and executive producer of the acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize, and Steve Fayer, series writer, draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it. Join brave and terrified youngsters walking through a jeering mob and up the steps of Central High School in Little Rock. Listen to the vivid voices of the ordinary people who manned the barricades, the laborers, the students, the housewives without whom there would have been no civil rights movements at all. This remarkable oral history brings to life country's great struggle for civil rights as no conventional narrative can. You will hear the voices of those who defied the blackjacks, who went to jail, who witnessed and policed the movement; of those who stood for and against it--voices from the heart of America.
The Autobiography of Medgar Evers is the first and only comprehensive collection of the words of slain civil rights hero Medgar Evers. Evers became a leader of the civil rights movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He established NAACP chapters throughout the Mississippi delta region, and eventually became the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar’s widow, partnered with Manning Marable, one of the country’s leading black scholars, to develop this book based on the previously untouched cache of Medgar’s personal documents and writings. These writings range from Medgar’s monthly reports to the NAACP to his correspondence with luminaries of the time such as Robert Carter, General Counsel for the NAACP in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Still, most moving of all, is the preface written by Myrlie Evers.
"We never can win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves!" Malcolm X learned from his father that black people should demand equality by taking their lives and futures into their own hands. Malcolm believed in this idea. It was one he lived by. Though Malcolm faced hard times growing up and even went to jail, he turned his life around. He read books and combined lessons he'd learned from his father and from the religious leader Elijah Muhammad. Soon Malcolm would become a powerful leader in the struggle for blacks to achieve equality. Malcolm died tragically when he was only thirty-nine, but his beliefs live on today. Walter Dean Myers's evenhanded narrative and Leonard Jenkins's striking paintings celebrate the man and the fiery message he brought to all people of color.
What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham's nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women's groups. Higginbotham's history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a "politics of respectability" and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities. Righteous Discontent finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.
The history of America's civil rights movement is marked by narratives that we hear retold again and again. This has relegated many key figures and turning points to the margins, but graphic novels and graphic memoirs present an opportunity to push against the consensus and create a more complete history. Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement showcases five vivid examples of this: Ho Che Anderson's King (2005), which complicates the standard biography of Martin Luther King Jr.; Congressman John Lewis's three-volume memoir, March (2013-2016); Darkroom (2012), by Lila Quintero Weaver, in which the author recalls her Argentinian father's participation in the movement and her childhood as an immigrant in the South; the bestseller The Silence of Our Friends, by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell (2012), set in Houston's Third Ward in 1967; and Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), whose protagonist is a closeted gay man involved in the movement. In choosing these five works, Jorge Santos also explores how this medium allows readers to participate in collective memory making, and what the books reveal about the process by which history is (re)told, (re)produced, and (re)narrativized. Concluding the work is Santos's interview with Ho Che Anderson.
This final installment in the powerful nonfiction trilogy about the African American experience introduces readers to the people, armed with the songs and strength passed down from their anc
