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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.
Image one: E-book titled Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture - synopsis: In this classic book on the meaning of multiculturalism in larger American society, Gary Okihiro explores the significance of Asian American experiences from the perspectives of historical consciousness, race, gender, class, and culture. While exploring anew the meanings of Asian American social history, Okihiro argues that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate today not from the so-called mainstream but from the margins, from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and the gay and lesbian community.
Image two: American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader - synopsis: Presenting the American Jewish historical experience from its communal beginnings to the present through documents, photographs, and other illustrations, many of which have never before been published, this entirely new collection of source materials complements existing textbooks on American Jewish history with an organization and pedagogy that reflect the latest historiographical trends and the most creative teaching approaches. Ten chapters, organized chronologically, include source materials that highlight the major thematic questions of each era and tell many stories about what it was like to immigrate and acculturate to American life, practice different forms of Judaism, engage with the larger political, economic, and social cultures that surrounded American Jews, and offer assistance to Jews in need around the world.
Image one: E-book titled The Shaman's Mirror: Visionary Art of the Huichol (2012) - synopsis: Huichol Indian yarn paintings are one of the world’s great indigenous arts, sold around the world and advertised as authentic records of dreams and visions of the shamans. Using glowing colored yarns, the Huichol Indians of Mexico paint the mystical symbols of their culture—the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, the blue deer-spirit who appears to the shamans as they croon their songs around the fire in all-night ceremonies deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, and the pilgrimages to sacred sites, high in the central Mexican desert of Wirikuta. Hope MacLean provides the first comprehensive study of Huichol yarn paintings, from their origins as sacred offerings to their transformation into commercial art. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, she interviews Huichol artists who have innovated important themes and styles.
Image two: Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (2015) - synopsis: In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man flung bits of papier-mâché into the air and glued them into place where they landed. One of these artists called the sessions “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada. In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada, showing how this strange artistic phenomenon spread across Europe and then the world in the wake of the Great War, fundamentally reshaping modern culture in ways we’re still struggling to understand today.
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Image one: E-book titled Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subculture of the Punk and Hardcore Generation (2011) - synopsis: Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation is a vibrant, in-depth, and visually appealing history of punk, which reveals punk concert flyers as urban folk art. David Ensminger exposes the movement’s deeply participatory street art, including flyers, stencils, and graffiti. This discovery leads him to an examination of the often-overlooked presence of African Americans, Latinos, women, and the LGBTQ community who have widely impacted the worldviews and music of this subculture.
Image two: E-book titled Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics, and Fanzines from 1976 (2018) - synopsis: Offers a collection of original essays exploring the motivations behind - and the politics within - the multitude of fanzines that emerged in the wake of British punk from 1976 that would be cut and pasted in bedrooms across the UK. From these, glimpses into provincial cultures, teenage style wars, and formative political ideas may be gleaned.
Image one: E-book titled Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez (2009) - synopsis: Though the field of comic book studies has burgeoned in recent years, Latino characters and creators have received little attention. Putting the spotlight on this vibrant segment, Your Brain on Latino Comics illuminates the world of superheroes Firebird, Vibe, and the Blue Beetle while also examining the effects on readers who are challenged to envision such worlds. Exploring mainstream companies such as Marvel and DC as well as rising stars from other segments of the industry, Frederick Aldama provides a new reading of race, ethnicity, and the relatively new storytelling medium of comics themselves.
Image two: E-book titled Marvel's Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography from Stan Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates (2018) - synopsis: Created by Marvel Comics Legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Black Panther is considered the first Black superhero in American mainstream comics. Through a textual analysis, this book narrates the history of the character from his first appearance in 1966—the same year, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California—through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ version in 2015. It tells the story of how Black and white writers envisioned the character between those years and reveals the limitations of white liberalism and the boundless nature of the Black imagination.
Image one: E-book titled The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (2011) - synopsis: Nwando Achebe presents the fascinating history of an Igbo woman, Ahebi Ugbabe, who became king in colonial Nigeria. Ugbabe was exiled from Igboland, became a prostitute, traveled widely, and learned to speak many languages. She became a close companion of Nigerian Igala kings and the British officers who supported her claim to the office of headman, warrant chief, and later, king. In this unique biography, Achebe traces the roots of Ugbabe’s rise to fame and fortune. While providing critical perspectives on women, gender, sex and sexuality, and the colonial encounter, she also considers how it was possible for this woman to take on the office and responsibilities of a traditionally male role.
Image two: E-book titled Indigenous Women's Movements in Latin America: Gender and Ethnicity in Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia (2016) - synopsis: This book explores the political contexts and internal dynamics of indigenous movements, to show that they created different opportunities for women to organize and voice specific demands. This, in turn, led to various forms of organizational autonomy for women involved in indigenous movements. The trajectories vary from the creation of autonomous spaces within mixed-gender organizations to the creation of independent organizations.
Image one: E-book titled Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas (2016) - synopsis: Drawing on troves of archival materials from numerous statewide sources, Stages of Struggle and Celebration captures the important legacies of the dramatic arts in a historical field that has paid most of its attention to black musicians. Setting the stage, the authors retrace the path of the cakewalk and African-inspired dance as forerunners to formalized productions at theaters in the major metropolitan areas. From Houston’s Ensemble and Encore Theaters to the Jubilee in Fort Worth, gospel stage plays of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, as well as San Antonio’s Hornsby Entertainment Theater Company and Renaissance Guild, concluding with ProArts Collective in Austin, Stages of Struggle and Celebration features founding narratives, descriptions of key players and memorable productions, and enlightening discussions of community reception and the business challenges faced by each theatre.
Image two: E-book titled Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (2014) - synopsis: Highlighting the accomplishments of black women who sought to create positive change after the end of WWI, this reference work includes representatives not only from the literary scene but also: activists, actresses, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, political, leaders, and scholars. By acknowledging the women who played vital—if not always recognized—roles in this movement, this book shows how their participation helped set the stage for the continued transformation of the black community well into the 1960s.
Image one: E-book titled Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (2015) - synopsis: Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations—particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston’s blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics.
Image two: E-book titled Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism (2015) - synopsis: In 1907, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. Will Guzmán delves into Nixon’s lifelong struggle against Jim Crow.
Image one: E-book titled A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (2014) - synopsis: 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.
Image two: E-book titled W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist (2015) - synopsis: W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most prolific African American authors, scholars, and leaders of the twentieth century, but none of his previous biographies have so practically and comprehensively introduced the man and his impact on American history as noted historian Shawn Alexander’s W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist. Alexander tells Du Bois’ story in a clear and concise manner, exploring his racial strategy, civil rights activity, journalistic career, and his role as an international spokesman.
Image one: E-book titled Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015) - synopsis: Black Women in Sequence takes readers on a search for women of African descent in comics subculture. From the 1971 appearance of the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly” - the first Black female superheroine in a comic book - to contemporary comic books, graphic novels, film, manga, and video gaming, a growing number of Black women are becoming producers, viewers, and subjects of sequential art. As the first detailed investigation of Black women’s participation in comic art, Black Women in Sequence examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.
Image two: E-book titled Marvel's Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography, from Stan Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates (2018) - synopsis: Created by Marvel Comics Legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Black Panther is considered the first Black superhero in American mainstream comics. Through a textual analysis, this book narrates the history of the character from his first appearance in 1966—the same year, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California—through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ version in 2015
Image one: E-book titled Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (2014) - synopsis: Africa in Stereo analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890-2011) to offer a new cultural history attesting to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. Tsitsi Jaji argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly, an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony.
Image two: E-book titled Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition (2010) - synopsis: In this book, Robert L. Stone follows the sound of steel guitar into the music-driven Pentecostal worship of two related churches: the House of God and the Church of the Living God. A rare outsider who has gained the trust of members and musicians inside the church, Stone uses nearly two decades of research, interviews, and fieldwork to tell the story of a vibrant musical tradition that straddles sacred and secular contexts. Most often identified with country and western bands, steel guitar is almost unheard of in African American churches—except for the House of God and the Church of the Living God, where it has been part of worship since the 1930s.
Image one: Black History Month
Image two: E-book titled Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (2019) - synopsis: In the 1960s and 70s, the two most important black nationalist organizations, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, gave voice and agency to the most economically and politically isolated members of black communities outside the South. Though vilified as fringe and extremist, these movements proved to be formidable agents of influence during the civil rights era, ultimately giving birth to the Black Power movement. Drawing on deep archival research and interviews with key participants, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar reconsiders the commingled stories of—and popular reactions to—the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and mainstream civil rights leaders.
Image three: E-book titled African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (2015) - synopsis: Well before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against nuclear weapons, African Americans were protesting the Bomb. Historians have generally ignored African Americans when studying the anti-nuclear movement, yet they were some of the first citizens to protest Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now for the first time, African Americans against the Bomb tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality.
Image one: Book titled The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001) - synopsis: An autobiography of the Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled and edited from articles, essays, speeches, sermons, letters, and other sources, examining his private and public life and describing his involvement in many important events in the Civil Rights Movement. - available in the UNT Dallas Library collection
Image two: Book titled Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (2012) - synopsis: While Martin Luther King, Jr., saw America as essentially a dream as yet unfulfilled, Malcolm X viewed America as a realized nightmare. James Cone cuts through superficial assessments of King and Malcolm as polar opposites to reveal two men whose visions are complementary and moving toward convergence. - available in the UNT Dallas Library collection
Image one: E-book titled Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021) - synopsis: Invokes contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and legacy. Like today’s organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a “radical revolution of values” was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. Shining new light on King’s largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, this book reconstructs, develops, and carries forward King’s strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.
Image two: E-book titled Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014) - synopsis: African American writers have incorporated Martin Luther King Jr. into their work since he rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature is a study by award-winning author Trudier Harris of King’s character and persona captured and reflected in works of African American literature as they continue to evolve.
Image one: MLK Day
Image two: E-book titled Misremembering Dr. King: Revisiting the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (2014) - synopsis: We all know the name. Martin Luther King Jr., the great American civil rights leader. But most people today know relatively little about King, the campaigner against militarism, materialism, and racism - what he called the “giant triplets.” Author Jennifer J. Yanco takes steps to redress this imbalance by briefly telling the familiar story of King’s civil rights campaigns and accomplishments before moving on to the lesser-known concerns that are an essential part of his legacy.
Image three: E-book titled The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Activism in the North (2016) - synopsis: Six months after the Selma to Montgomery marches and just weeks after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a group from Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff arrived in Chicago, eager to apply his nonviolent approach to social change in a northern city. The open housing demonstrations they organized eventually resulted in a controversial agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley and other city leaders, the fallout of which has historically led some to conclude that the movement was largely ineffective. In this important volume, an eminent team of scholars and activists offer an alternative assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement's impact on race relations and social justice, both in the city and across the nation.
Image one: E-book titled Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (2013) - synopsis: First published in 1942, Sun Chief is the autobiography of Hopi Chief Don C. Talayesva and offers a unique insider view on Hopi society. In a new Foreword, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert situates the book within contemporary Hopi studies, exploring how scholars have used the book since its publication more than seventy years ago.
Image two: E-book titled Tales of the Earth: Native American Creation Mythology (2021) - synopsis: A revealing analysis of key themes in Native American origin myths—and their stark contrast with the exceptionalist values of the United States. Tales of the Earth is a comprehensive yet concise overview of Native American mythologies. After outlining theories of the origins of Native North Americans, David Leeming considers the creation myths of many different tribes along with commonly occurring figures within their mythologies.
Image one: E-book titled Stone Artifacts of Texas Indians (2011) - synopsis: Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes over 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. This third edition boasts twice as many illustrations—all drawn from actual specimens—and still includes charts, geographic distribution maps and reliable age-dating information. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of theses ancient cultures.
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. 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 Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (2018) - synopsis: Most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life. Land desecration, treaty rights, political status, cultural revitalization: these are among the themes taken up by a broad cross-section of interviewees from across the United States and from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and New Zealand.
Image two: E-book titled Living on Thin Ice: The Gwich'in Natives of Alaska (2016) - synopsis: The Gwich’in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered since the turn of the millennium, this volume offers an interdisciplinary evaluation of the developments that have occurred in the community over the past several decades.
Image one: E-book titled Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop (2016) - synopsis: Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. Arranged both chronologically and according to popular generic forms, the book gives Indigenous pop a broad new meaning.
Image two: E-book titled I Am Where I Come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories (2017) - synopsis: I 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. The autobiographies contained in this book explore issues of native identity, adjustment to the college environment, cultural and familial influences, and academic and career aspirations.
Image one: E-book titled Prairie Man: The Struggle between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin (2015) - synopsis: U.S. Government policy toward Native Americans after the Battle of the Little Big Horn was to give them a makeover as Americans after finally and firmly displacing them from their lands. Sitting Bull, when forced to accept reservation life, understood who was in control, but his view of reservation life was very different from that of the Indian Bureau and its agents. His people’s birth right was their native heritage and culture. Although redrawn by the Government, he believed that the prairie land still held a special meaning of place for the Lakota. Those in power dictated a contrary view - with the closing of the frontier, the Indian was challenged to accept the white road or vanish. In the case of the Lakota, that position was given personification in the form of Agent James McLaughlin. This book explores the story within Sitting Bull’s and James McLaughlin’s conflict and offers new perspectives and insights.
Image two: E-book titled The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (2014) - synopsis: In 1791, General Arthur St. Clair led the United States army in a campaign to destroy a complex of Indian villages at the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio. Almost within reach of their objective, St. Clair’s 1,400 men were attacked by about one thousand Indians. The U.S. force was decimated, suffering nearly one thousand casualties in killed and wounded, while Indian casualties numbered only a few dozen. Native American historian Colin Calloway demonstrates here that St. Clair’s Defeat—as it came to be known—was hugely important for its time. It was both the biggest victory the Native Americans ever won, and, proportionately, the biggest military disaster the United States had suffered.
Image one: E-book titled Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (2013) - synopsis: In Mark My Words, Mishuana Goeman traces settler colonialism as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, demonstrating how it persists in the contemporary context of neoliberal globalization. The book argues that it is vital to refocus the efforts of Native nations beyond replicating settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Through an examination of twentieth-century Native women’s poetry and prose, Goeman illuminates how these works can serve to remap settler geographies and center Native knowledges.
Image two: E-book titled The Women's National Indian Association: A History (2015) - synopsis: The Women’s National Indian Association was formed in 1879 in reaction to the prospect of opening Oklahoma Indian Territory to white settlement. A powerful network of upper- and middle-class friends and associates, the group soon expanded its mission beyond prayer and philanthropy as the women participated in political protest and organized successful petition drives that focused on securing civil and political rights for American Indians. In addition to discussing the association’s history, the contributors to this book evaluate its legacies, both in the lives of Indian families and in the evolution of federal Indian policy.
Image two: E-book titled Land of the Tejas: Native American Identity and Interaction in Texas, A.D. 1300 to 1700 (2012) - synopsis: Combining archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and environmental data, Land of the Tejas represents a sweeping, interdisciplinary look at Texas during the late prehistoric and early historic periods. Through this revolutionary approach, John Wesley Arnn reconstructs Native identity and social structures among both mobile foragers and sedentary agriculturalists.
Image three: E-book titled Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (2016) - synopsis: Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine.
Image one: E-book titled Food across Borders (2017) - synopsis: The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes "American" in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from "the line in the sand" that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between "our" food and "their" food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between "us" and "them." The stories told in Food across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Image two: E-book titled La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (2014) - synopsis: Commemorating Juan Ponce de León's landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence in the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida's past and present and will assuredly shape its future.
Image one: E-book titled Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (2014) - synopsis: The last two decades have produced continued Latino population growth, and marked shifts in both communications and immigration policy. Since the 1990s, Spanish-language radio has dethroned English-language radio stations in major cities across the United States, taking over the number one spot in Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and New York City. Investigating the cultural and political history of U.S. Spanish-language broadcasts throughout the twentieth century, Sounds of Belonging reveals how these changes have helped Spanish-language radio secure its dominance in the major U.S. radio markets.
Image two: E-book titled The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics, and Latin American Social Movements (2016) - synopsis: Bringing to life the stories of political teatristas, feminists, gunrunners, labor organizers, poets, journalists, ex-prisoners, and other revolutionaries, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico examines the inspiration Chicanas/os found in social movements in Mexico and Latin America from 1971 to 1979. Drawing on fifteen years of interviews and archival research, including examinations of declassified government documents from Mexico, this study uncovers encounters between activists and artists across borders while sharing a socialist-oriented, anticapitalist vision.
Image one: E-book titled The Chicana/o Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje (2013) - synopsis: Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexicana/o and Chicana/o culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chicano/a rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chicano/a or Mexicano/a today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chicano/as and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chicano/a and Mexicano/a hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper.
Image two: E-book titled Mexicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction (2020) - synopsis: Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, Mexicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity.
Image one: Constitution Week
Image two: E-book titled African Americans and the First Amendment: The Case for Liberty and Equality (2019) - synopsis: Utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate that a strong commitment to civil liberty and to racial equality are mutually supportive. This crucial connection is evidenced throughout US history, from the days of colonial and antebellum slavery to Jim Crow: in the landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1937 freeing the black communist Angelo Herndon; in the struggles and victories of the civil rights movement, from the late 1930s to the late ’60s; and in the historical and modern debates over hate speech restrictions. Liberty and equality can conflict in individual cases, Shiell argues, but there is no fundamental conflict between them. Robust First Amendment values protect and encourage demands for racial equality while weak First Amendment values, in contrast, lead to censorship and a chilling of demands for racial equality.
Image two: E-book titled A Constitutional History of the U.S. Supreme Court (2015) - synopsis: Presents a concise overview and general history for readers and students in constitutional history and politics, one that will also make an excellent fact-filled source book for lawyers and political scientists. The chapters deal with leading decisions of successive courts and begin with brief biographies of the justices on the courts. Famous cases from Marbury v Madison, to the Dred-Scott decision, Brown v Board of Education, Roe v Wade, up to the Roberts court decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare are discussed. Four appendices deal with the text of the Constitution and amendments, the court system, a chronological list of the justices with biographical details, and a chronological list of the membership on successive courts.
Image one: Hispanic Heritage Month
Image two: E-book titled Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento - Mexican American, Civil Rights Activist, and Texas Feminist (2020) - synopsis: The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901-1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento's achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.
Image two: E-book titled Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City (2018) - synopsis: The vibrant collection Latino Mayors features case studies of eleven Latino mayors in six American cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford, Miami, and Providence. The editors and contributors analyze Latino mayors for their governing styles and policies. They describe how candidates shaped race, class, and economic issues--particularly in deracialized campaigns. Latino Mayors also addresses coalition politics, political incorporation, and how community groups operate, as well as the challenges these pioneers have faced in office from political tensions and governance issues that sometimes even harm Latinos.
Image one: E-book titled Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaii (2016) - synopsis: In 1893 a small group of white planters and missionary descendants backed by the United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai'i and established a government modeled on the Jim Crow South. In Nation Within Tom Coffman tells the complex history of the unsuccessful efforts of deposed Hawaiian queen Lili'uokalani and her subjects to resist annexation, which eventually came in 1898. Coffman describes native Hawaiian political activism, the queen's visits to Washington, D.C., to lobby for independence, and her imprisonment, along with hundreds of others, after their aborted armed insurrection. Exposing the myths that fueled the narrative that native Hawaiians willingly relinquished their nation, Coffman shows how Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt conspired to extinguish Hawai'i's sovereignty in the service of expanding the United States' growing empire.
Image two: E-book titled The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People (2012) - synopsis: Thousands of years ago, Maine’s Red Paint People, so called because of the red ochre in their burial sites, were among the first maritime cultures in the Americas. They could have subsisted on easily caught cod, but they chose to capture dangerous and elusive swordfish. This book explains beautifully the prehistory of these people, the evolution of archaeological thinking about them, and the myriad new scientific threads that shed new light on this old culture.
Image one: E-book titled American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader (2014) - synopsis: Presenting the American Jewish historical experience from its communal beginnings to the present through documents, photographs, and other illustrations, many of which have never been published, this entirely new collection of source materials complements existing textbooks on American Jewish history with an organization and pedagogy that reflect the latest historiographical trends and the most creative teaching approaches. Ten chapters, organized chronologically, include source materials that highlight the major thematic questions of each era and tell many stories about what it was like to immigrate and acculturate to American life, practice different forms of Judaism, engage with the larger political, economic, and social cultures that surrounded American Jews, and offer assistance to Jews in need around the world.
Image two: E-book titled From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States (2015) - synopsis: Historian Haiming Liu takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting us witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso’s chicken. Along the way, Haiming Liu explains how immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates and gives us a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.
Image one: E-book titled Transgender Mental Health (2018) - synopsis: Societal awareness of transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) individuals is greater now than at any point in history. 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.
Image two: E-book titled Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community (2016) - synopsis: The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ “two-spirit” identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco’s two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.
Image one: E-book titled Pocket Guide to LGBTQ Mental Health: Understanding the Spectrum of Gender and Sexuality (2020) - synopsis: A down-to-earth, informative, and affirming manual for mental health clinicians working with patients of diverse gender and sexual identities. In recent years, people have begun to grapple with these issues in a healthier, more public way, and mental health practitioners must be prepared to meet their patients with the knowledge, understanding, and grasp of the context in which patients live their lives. The editors have brought their specialized knowledge to the project and, along with contributors who are experts in the field of LGBTQ mental health, have created a book of uncommon empathy. The volume's structure is simple, consistent, and effective, with 10 chapters covering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and allied individuals.
Image two: E-book titled Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation (2016) - synopsis: Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation focuses on the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health, and considers both risk and resiliency factors for the Black LGBT population. Contributors to this collection intimately understand the associations between health and intersectional anti-Black racism, heterosexism, homonegativity, biphobia, transphobia, and social class. This collection fills a gap in current scholarship by providing information about an array of health issues like cancer, juvenile incarceration, and depression that affect all subpopulations of Black LGBT people, especially Black bisexual-identified women, Black bisexual-identified men, and Black transgender men.
Image one: E-book titled A Companion to Modern African Art (2013) - synopsis: Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization. A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material.
Image two: E-book titled Modernist Art in Ethiopia (2019) - synopsis: If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia—the first book-length study of the topic—Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country’s supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context.
Image one: E-book titled The First Fifteen: How Asian American Women Became Federal Judges (2021) - synopsis: In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments. This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship.
Image two: Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (2014) - synopsis: Love and Liberation reads the autobiographical and biographical writings of one of the few Tibetan Buddhist women to record the story of her life. Sera Khandro Künzang Dekyong Chönyi Wangmo (also called Dewé Dorjé, 1892–1940) was extraordinary not only for achieving religious mastery as a Tibetan Buddhist visionary and guru to many lamas, monastics, and laity in the Golok region of eastern Tibet, but also for her candor. This book listens to Sera Khandro’s conversations with land deities, dakinis, bodhisattvas, lamas, and fellow religious community members whose voices interweave with her own to narrate what is a story of both love between Sera Khandro and her guru, Drimé Özer, and spiritual liberation.
Image one: E-book titled Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017) - synopsis: Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
Image two: E-book titled Nurse Writers of the Great War (2016) - synopsis: The First World War was the first “total war.” Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men, and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses to alleviate their suffering. Some were fully-trained professionals; others had minimal preparation, and served as volunteer-nurses. Nurse Writers of the Great War examines these nurses’ memoirs and explores the insights they offer into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare. The book combines close biographical research with textual analysis, in order to offer an understanding of both nurses’ wartime experiences and the ways in which their lives and backgrounds contributed to the style and content of their writing.
Image one: E-book titled Farzana: The Woman Who Saved an Empire (2014) - synopsis: Amongst the riches of 19th century India, as the British fought their way across Mughal territory, an orphaned street-girl is brought to court to perform for the Emperor. That girl was Farzana, and she would become a courtesan, a leader of armies, a treasured defender of the last Mughal emperor and the head of one of the most legendary courts in history. In this book, Julia Keay weaves a story which spans the Indian continent and the end of a golden era in Indian history, the story of a nobody who became a teenage seductress and died one of the richest and most prominent woman of her age. Farzana rode into battle atop a stallion, though only 4.5 feet tall, and led an army which defended a sickly Mughal empire. She dabbled in witchcraft while gaining favour with the Pope, and died a favourite of the British Raj.
Image two: E-book titled SheMurenga: The Zimbabwe Women's Movement, 1995 to 2000 (2013) - synopsis: This book demonstrates the place of women’s movements during a defining period of contemporary Zimbabwe. The government of Robert Mugabe may have been as firmly in power in 2000 as it was in 1995, but the intervening years saw severe economic crisis, mass strikes and protests, the start of land occupations, intervention in the war in the DRC, and the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Author Shereen Essof shows how Zimbabwean women crafted responses to these and other events, and aimed for a feminist agenda that would prioritize the interests of the rural and urban poor.
Image one: Women's History Month
Image two: E-book titled Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015) - synopsis: From the 1971 appearance of the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly” – the first Black female superheroine in a comic book – to contemporary comic books, graphic novels, film, manga, and video gaming, a growing number of Black women are becoming producers, viewers, and subjects of sequential art. As the first detailed investigation of Black women’s participation in comic art, Black Women in Sequence examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.
Image three: E-book titled Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History (2021) - synopsis: Baseline Shift captures the untold stories of women across time who used graphic design to earn a living while changing the world, centering diverse women across backgrounds whose work has shaped, shifted, and formed graphic design as we know it today. From an interdisciplinary book designer and calligrapher during Harlem’s Renaissance, to the invisible drafters of Monotype’s drawing office, the women represented here include auteurs, advocates for social justice, and creators ahead of their time.
Image one: E-book titled Caring for Equality: A History of African American Health and Healthcare (2018) - synopsis: In Caring for Equality, David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans.
Image two: E-book titled Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: "There Is a Mystery..." - synopsis: In Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There is a Mystery…,” Stephen C. Finley, Margarita Simon Guillory, and Hugh R. Page, Jr. assemble twenty groundbreaking essays that provide a rationale and parameters for Africana Esoteric Studies (AES): a new trans-disciplinary enterprise focused on the investigation of esoteric lore and practices in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Image one: Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015) - synopsis: Editors Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown have brought twenty stories together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism), but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.
Image two: E-book titled Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (2015) - synopsis: In Nursing Civil Rights, Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army. As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter, and each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered.
Image one: E-book titled Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (2013) - synopsis: A staunch proponent of breaking down racial and gender barriers, Shirley Chisholm had the esteemed privilege of being a pioneer in many aspects of her life. She was the first African American woman from Brooklyn elected to the New York State legislature and the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968. She also made a run for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972. Focusing on Chisholm’s lifelong advocacy for fair treatment, access to education, and equal pay for all American minority groups, this book explores the life of a remarkable woman in the context of twentieth-century urban America and the tremendous social upheaval that occurred after World War II.
Image two: E-book titled Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements (2005) - synopsis: The traditional narrative of the civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily by male leaders has been complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights movement but often functioned autonomously from—and sometimes even at odds with—the national movement. Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national successes.
Image one: E-book titled Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (2015) - synopsis: 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 considers 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. 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 and civil rights.
Image two: E-book titled Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (2015) - synopsis: Posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007, Richard Durham creatively chronicled and brought to life the significant events of his times. Durham’s trademark narrative style engaged listeners with fascinating characters, compelling details, and sharp images of pivotal moments in American and African American history and culture. In Word Warrior, award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durham's astounding career.
Image one: E-book titled Before Jackie Robinson: The Transcendent Role of Black Sporting Pioneers (2017) - synopsis: While the accomplishments and influence of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali are doubtless impressive solely on their merits, these luminaries of the Black sporting experience did not emerge spontaneously. Their rise was part of a gradual evolution in social and power relations in American culture between the 1890s and 1940s that included athletes such as jockey Isaac Murphy, barnstorming pilot Bessie Coleman, and golfer Teddy Rhodes.
Image two: E-book titled Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas (2016) - synopsis: Retraces the path of the cakewalk and African-inspired dance as forerunners to formalized productions at theaters in the major metropolitan areas. From Houston's Ensemble and Encore Theaters to the Jubilee in Fort Worth, gospel stage plays of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, as well as San Antonio's Hornsby Entertainment Theater Company and Renaissance Guild, concluding with ProArts Collective in Austin, this book features founding narratives, descriptions of key players and memorable productions, and enlightening discussions of community reception and the business challenges faced by each theatre.
