To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey Drawing on a new generation of scholarship about the civil rights era in America, To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class, and his call for "non-violent resistance" to all forms of oppression, including economic injustice. Phase one of that struggle led to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. In phase two, King organised poor people and demonstrated for union rights, while seeking a "moral revolution" to replace the self-seeking individualism of the rich with an overriding concern for the common good. To the Promised Land asks us to think about what it would mean to truly fulfil King's legacy and move towards what he called "the Promised Land" in our own time.
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr by Clayborne Carson With knowledge, spirit, good humor, and passion, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. brings to life a remarkable man whose thoughts and actions speak to our most burning contemporary issues and still inspire the desires, hopes, and dreams of us all. Written in his own words, this history-making autobiography is Martin Luther King: the mild-mannered, inquisitive child and student who chafed under and eventually rebelled against segregation; the dedicated young minister who continually questioned the depths of his faith and the limits of his wisdom; the loving husband and father who sought to balance his family's needs with those of a growing, nationwide movement; and the reflective, world-famous leader who was fired by a vision of equality for people everywhere. Relevant and insightful, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. offers King's seldom disclosed views on some of the world's greatest and most controversial figures: John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Lyndon B. Johnson, Mahatma Gandhi, and Richard Nixon. It also paints a rich and moving portrait of a people, a time, and a nation in the face of powerful change. Finally, it shows how everyday Americans from all walks of life confronted themselves, each other, and the burden of the past-and how their fears and courage helped shape our future.
The Shadow of Selma by Joe Street (Editor); Henry Knight Lozano (Editor) The Shadow of Selma provides a comprehensive assessment of the 1965 civil rights campaign, the historical memory of the marches, and the continuing relevance of and challenges to the Voting Rights Act. The essays consider Selma not just as a keystone event but, much like Ferguson today, a transformative place: a supposedly unimportant location that became the focal point of epochal historical events. Contributors to this innovative volume examine the relationship between the memorable figures of the campaign?Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, among others?and the thousands of other unheralded people who also crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way from Selma to Montgomery. They analyze networks that undergirded as well as opposed the movement, placing it in broader historical, political, and international contexts. Addressing the influential role of media representations from contemporary newspaper and television coverage to the 2014 Hollywood film by Ava DuVernay, several of the essays challenge the redemptive narrative that has shaped popular memory, one that glosses over ongoing racial problems. Finally, the volume explores the fifty-year legacy of the Voting Rights Act, with particular focus on Shelby County vs. Holder, which in 2013 seemed to suggest that the Act had solved the disfranchisement problems of the civil rights era and was outdated. Taken together, the essays argue that while today the obstacles to racial equality may look different than a literacy test or a grim-faced Alabama State Trooper, they are no less real.
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Image one: E-book titled A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2015) - synopsis: In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized.
Image two: E-book titled The Life of Sherman Coolidge, Arapaho Activist (2022) - synopsis: Sherman Coolidge’s (1860-1932) panoramic life as survivor of the Indian Wars, witness to the maladministration of the reservation system, mediator between Native and white worlds, and ultimate defender of Native rights and heritage made him the embodiment of his era in American Indian history. Born as Des-che-wa-wah to a band of Northern Arapaho in present-day Wyoming and later adopted by a sympathetic infantry lieutenant who changed his name, Coolidge inhabited western plains and eastern cities, rode in military campaigns against the Lakota, entered the Episcopal priesthood, labored as missionary to his tribe on the Wind River Reservation, fomented dangerous conspiracies, married a wealthy New York heiress, met with presidents and congressmen, and became one of the nation’s most prominent Indigenous persons as leader of the Native-run reform group the Society of American Indians. Coolidge’s fascinating biography is essential for understanding the myriad ways Native Americans faced modernity at the turn of the century.
Image one: E-book titled Bears: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives in Native North America (2020) - synopsis: Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in Indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic. Bears charts the special relationship between the American black bear and humans in eastern Native American cultures across thousands of years. These essays draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico.
Image two: E-book titled The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama (2021) - synopsis: Boasting more than 130 paintings and engravings, Painted Bluff is perhaps the most elaborate prehistoric pictograph site east of the Mississippi River. Positioned at several levels on a dramatic sandstone cliff along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, the spectacular paintings and engravings depict mythical creatures, dancing humans, and mystical portals. The Cosmos Revealed is the first complete documentation of one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern North America. Through art, the site materializes a model or “cosmogram” of the Mississippian Native American view of the universe, offering connections between the visible and invisible worlds for Native spiritual leaders and other visitors.
Image one: E-book titled A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder (2016) - synopsis: 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. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counselor; 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 her adopted city, Thunder Bay, Ontario. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humor, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.
Image two: E-book titled Left Handed, Son of Old Man Hat: A Navajo Autobiography (2018) - synopsis: Left Handed (Navajo) (1868–?) was a Diné man who was born at Hweéldi (the Bosque Redondo prison camp), where the American military held Navajos from 1863 to 1868, and then returned to the Navajo homeland with his family. At the time of Walter Dyk’s interviews about his life, he was positioned as an elder who had lived well and prospered. With a simplicity as disarming as it is frank, Left Handed tells the story of his life as he learns the Navajo lifeway, which is founded on the principles of honesty, foresightedness, and self-discipline.
Image one: E-book titled The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender, and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890 (2017) - synopsis: The Specter of the Indian unveils the centrality of Native American spirit guides during the emergent years of American Spiritualism. By pulling together cultural and political history; the studies of religion, race, and gender; and the ghostly, Kathryn Troy offers a new layer of understanding to the prevalence of mystically styled Indians in American visual and popular culture. The connections between Spiritualist print and contemporary Indian policy provide fresh insight into the racial dimensions of social reform among nineteenth-century Spiritualists. Troy draws fascinating parallels between the contested belief of Indians as fading from the world, claims of returned apparitions, and the social impetus to provide American Indians with a means of existence in white America.
Image two: E-book titled Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility of Native America (2015) - synopsis: Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns.
Image one: E-book titled Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (2023) - synopsis: The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people. Although the missteps and occasional blunders of the Indians in the BIA have at times damaged the federal-Indian relationship and fueled the ire of their people, and although the BIA is massively underfunded, Indians began crafting the BIA into a Native agency by reformulating the meanings of concepts that lay at its heart—concepts such as tribal sovereignty, treaties, the trust responsibility, and Indian land.
Image two: E-book titled Native American Entrepreneurs (2020) - synopsis: This book captures the entrepreneurial stories and mindsets of contemporary Native Americans. Native American entrepreneurs are important contributors to the American economy and social landscape. Faced with numerous challenges, many Native American entrepreneurs have learned to transcend tough obstacles, leverage resources, and strategically pursue opportunities to achieve business success.
Image one: E-book titled Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013) - synopsis: As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.
Image two: E-book titled The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (2017) - synopsis: Locally sourced, seasonal, “clean” ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here—and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef’s healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut-maple bites.
Image one: Native American Heritage Month
Image two: E-book titled Prairie Man: The Struggle between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin (2015) - synopsis: Sitting Bull had resisted the United States’ intrusions into Lakota prairie land for years, refused to sign treaties, and called for a gathering of tribes at Little Big Horn. He epitomized resistance. Sitting Bull’s role in the Battle of Little Big Horn has been the subject of hundreds of historical works, but while Sitting Bull was in fact present, he did not engage in the battle. The conflict with Custer was a benchmark to the subsequent events. There are other battles than those of war, and the conflict between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin was one of those battles. Theirs was a fight over the hearts and minds of the Lakota.
Image three - E-book titled The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864-1891 (2015) - synopsis: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins has long been recognized as an important 19th century American Indian activist and writer. Yet her acclaimed performances and speaking tours across the United States, along with the copious newspaper articles that grew out of those tours, have been largely ignored and forgotten. The Newspaper Warrior presents new material that enhances public memory as the first volume to collect hundreds of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, advertisements, book reviews, and editorial comments by and about Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. This anthology gathers together her literary production for newspapers and magazines from her 1864 performances in San Francisco to her untimely death in 1891, focusing on the years 1879 to 1887, when Winnemucca Hopkins gave hundreds of lectures in the eastern and western United States; published her book, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883); and established a bilingual school for Native American children.
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Image one: E-book titled Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales (2013) - synopsis: In new translations and with an introduction by Sibelan Forrester, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales is a selection of tales that draws from the famous collection of Aleksandr Afanas’ev, but also includes some tales from the lesser-known nineteenth-century collection of Ivan Khudiakov. This new collection includes beloved classics such as “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and “The Frog Princess,” as well as a version of the tale that is the basis for the ballet “The Firebird.”
Image two: E-book titled The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2015) - synopsis: Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry.
Image one: E-book titled Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror (2023) - synopsis: Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap more than we would expect? Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination.
Image two: E-book titled Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters (2021) - synopsis: Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies.
