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Loewen (emeritus, sociology, U. of Vermont) exposes the history and persistence of "sundown towns," so-named for the signs often found at their corporate limits warning African Americans and other minorities not to be found in the town after dusk. He historically situates the rise of the sundown town movement in the years following the Civil War; describes the mechanisms of violence, threats, law, and policy that were used to force minorities out...
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1210L
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Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation's enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass's masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race...
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Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...
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This sports book, memoir, and manifesto from a Super Bowl Champion elucidates racism in the United States.
Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable.
Bennett adds his unmistakable voice
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"In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O.J. Simpson, who many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this work, distinguished race relations scholar...
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"There's a long tradition of white people opposing racism--but there are also many excuses we give for not getting involved. Now in a fully updated 4th edition, Uprooting Racism is the supportive, practical go-to guide for helping white people work with others for equal opportunity, democracy, and justice in these divisive and angry times."--
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From family trees written in early American bibles to birther conspiracy theories, genealogy has always mattered in the United States, whether for taking stock of kin when organizing a family reunion or drawing on membership - by blood or other means - to claim rights to land, inheritances, and more. And since the advent of DNA kits that purportedly trace genealogical relations through genetics, millions of people have used them to learn about their...
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From Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, Scorpion Tongues is a popular history of gossip in American politics. Complete with wickedly delightful anecdotes of major and minor politicians and entertainers over the last 200 years, Gail Collins examines the evolving relationship between politicians and the press and the blurring of the lines between politicians and celebrities. Supported by extensive research and written with an entertaining...
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"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...
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Benjamin draws on her own experiences as well as research to show how we can build a more just world--one small, and viral, step at a time.
"Long before the pandemic, Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. The twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Here she explores how we can transform society...
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American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality...
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"Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore and became an extraordinary champion of liberty and equality. Throughout his long life, Douglass was also a man of profound religious conviction. ... With an eye toward explaining how Douglass's religious beliefs shaped his influential public career, Dilbeck retells the story of Douglass's life."--
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Born into slavery, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (ca. 1824-1907) rose to a position of respect as a talented dressmaker and designer to the political elite of Washington, D.C., and a confidante of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In this unusual memoir, Keckley offers a rare, behind-the-scenes view of the formal and informal networks that African Americans established among themselves, as well as an insider's perspective of the men who made Civil War politics...
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"Feels Like Home is a love letter to Ronstadt's Mexican American roots. It tells of her coming of age in the world between Tucson and the Rio Sonora region of northern Mexico, presented through stories, photographs, and recipes."--
Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the high desert, offering a personal tour of the place where she came of age. Braiding together her recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood...
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"Grace M. Cho grew up in a small, rural American town as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. When Grace was fifteen, her Korean mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, TASTES LIKE WAR is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history to understand herself...
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"Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream-and they ended up disrupting popular...
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How do you hold on to hope after more than twenty years of imprisonment? For Alice Marie Johnson the answer lies with God. For years, Alice lived a normal life without a criminal record -- she was a manager at FedEx, a wife, and a mother. But after an emotionally and financially tumultuous period in her life left her with few options, she turned to crime as a way to pay off her mounting debts. Convicted in 1996 for her nonviolent involvement in a...
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"When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No...
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"'This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos'--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; 'Mumia's writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition,...
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