Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family.
Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar’s secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state’s “black belt.” They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children.
On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple’s driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar’s fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right.
In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
HarperAudio
|
9780063068797
|
Hardcover
Birding to Change the World
By O'kane, Trish
In this uplifting memoir, a professor and activist shares what birds can teach us about life, social change, and protecting the environment.Trish O'Kane is an accidental ornithologist. In her nearly two decades writing about justice as an investigative journalist, she'd never paid attention to nature. But then Hurricane Katrine destroyed her New Orleans home, sending her into an emotional tailspin.Enter a scrappy cast of feathered characters - first a cardinal, urban parrots, and sparrows, then a catbird, owls, a bittern, and a woodcock - that cheered her up and showed her a new path. Inspired, O'Kane moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to pursue an environmental studies PhD. There she became a full-on bird obsessive - logging hours in a stunningly biodiverse urban park, filling field notebooks with bird doings and dramas, and teaching ornithology to college students and middle-school kids.
Ecco
|
9780063223141
|
Hardcover
Normal Women
By Gregory, Philippa
"Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional narratives of Britain's past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart." - Dan Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets"Stunning. . . . Full of surprises. . . . A brilliant, essential read." - The Independent (UK) The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus - a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history and "should be included in every history lesson" (Glamour UK) Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior?These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women.
HarperOne
|
9780063304321
|
Hardcover
Smoke and Ashes
By Ghosh, Amitav
Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family -- the climax of a yearslong project.When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story.Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374602925
|
Hardcover
I Never Did Like Politics
By Golway, Terry
A hugely entertaining celebration of one of America's greatest politicians - a source of inspiration for our equally challenging times.... Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the twentieth century's most colorful politicians - on the New York and national stage. He was also quintessentially American: the son of Italian immigrants, who rose in society through sheer will and chutzpah. Almost one hundred years later, America is once again grappling with issues that would have been familiar to the Little Flower, as he was affectionately known. It's time to bring back LaGuardia, argues historian and journalist Terry Golway, to remind us all what an effective municipal officer (as he preferred to call himself) can achieve.... Golway examines LaGuardia's extraordinary career through four essential qualities: As a patriot, a dissenter, a leader, and a statesman.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781250285782
|
Hardcover
The Secret History of Bigfoot
By O'connor, John
From the shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest to off-the-wall cryptozoological conventions, one man searches high and low for the answer to the question: real or not, why do we want to believe?Journalist and writer John O'Connor takes readers on a narrative quest through the American wilds in search of Bigfoot, its myth and meaning. Inhabited by an eccentric cast of characters - reputable men of science and deluded charlatans alike - the book explores the zany and secretive world of "cryptozoology," tracking Bigfoot from the Wild Men of Native American and European lore to Harry and the Hendersons, while examining the forces behind our ever-widening belief in the supernatural. By turns an ardent, philosophical defense of nature, investigation into what Kurt Andersen calls our peculiar "American appetites for immersive make-believe," and a gonzo trip into alternative reality, this is the story of our Bigfoot obsession - where it comes from, what it means today - and the people driving it.
Sourcebooks
|
9781464216633
|
Hardcover
The Deerfield Massacre
By Swanson, James L.
In the tradition of the New York Times bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon comes a spellbinding account of a forgotten chapter in American history: the deadly confrontation between Native Americans and colonists in Massachusetts in 1704 and the tragic saga that unfolded, written by acclaimed historian James Swanson.. Once it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten. In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England - the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade - known to early Americans as "The Old Indian Door" - constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from the most dramatic moment in colonial American history: Leap Year, February 29, 1704, a cold, snowy night when hundreds of native Americans and their French allies swept down upon an isolated frontier outpost and ruthlessly slaughtered its inhabitants.
Scribner
|
9781501108167
|
Hardcover
The Age of Revolutions
By Perl-rosenthal, Nathan
A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand. The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown - from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun - he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story.
Basic Books
|
9781541603196
|
Hardcover
Loved Egyptian Night
By Roberts, Hugh
Why did the Arab Spring have such calamitous outcomes?. Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 and what it led to amounted to a political revolution.. But the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria - countries with quite different histories and political traditions - were never revolutions. As Hugh Roberts explains, the bitter ends of these episodes were inscribed in their misunderstood beginnings. To celebrate these uprisings as 'revolutions' preempts and inhibits critical analysis and expresses an abdication of intellectual responsibility.. After so much wishful thinking, what remains is the debris of a cynical pretension.
Verso
|
9781839768835
|
Hardcover
Life After Power
By Cohen, Jared
New York Times bestselling author of Accidental Presidents explores what happens after the most powerful job in the world: President of the United States. Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington's departure after two terms made him "the greatest character of the age." But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might "[wander] among the people like ghosts." They were both right. Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life. Thomas Jefferson was the first former president to accomplish great things after the White House, shaping public debates and founding the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he included on his tombstone, unlike his presidency.
Medgar and Myrlie
By Reid, Joy-ann
Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family. Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar’s secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state’s “black belt.” They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children. On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple’s driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar’s fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right. In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
Birding to Change the World
By O'kane, Trish
In this uplifting memoir, a professor and activist shares what birds can teach us about life, social change, and protecting the environment.Trish O'Kane is an accidental ornithologist. In her nearly two decades writing about justice as an investigative journalist, she'd never paid attention to nature. But then Hurricane Katrine destroyed her New Orleans home, sending her into an emotional tailspin.Enter a scrappy cast of feathered characters - first a cardinal, urban parrots, and sparrows, then a catbird, owls, a bittern, and a woodcock - that cheered her up and showed her a new path. Inspired, O'Kane moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to pursue an environmental studies PhD. There she became a full-on bird obsessive - logging hours in a stunningly biodiverse urban park, filling field notebooks with bird doings and dramas, and teaching ornithology to college students and middle-school kids.
Normal Women
By Gregory, Philippa
"Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional narratives of Britain's past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart." - Dan Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets"Stunning. . . . Full of surprises. . . . A brilliant, essential read." - The Independent (UK) The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus - a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history and "should be included in every history lesson" (Glamour UK) Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior?These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women.
Smoke and Ashes
By Ghosh, Amitav
Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family -- the climax of a yearslong project.When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story.Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.
I Never Did Like Politics
By Golway, Terry
A hugely entertaining celebration of one of America's greatest politicians - a source of inspiration for our equally challenging times.... Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the twentieth century's most colorful politicians - on the New York and national stage. He was also quintessentially American: the son of Italian immigrants, who rose in society through sheer will and chutzpah. Almost one hundred years later, America is once again grappling with issues that would have been familiar to the Little Flower, as he was affectionately known. It's time to bring back LaGuardia, argues historian and journalist Terry Golway, to remind us all what an effective municipal officer (as he preferred to call himself) can achieve.... Golway examines LaGuardia's extraordinary career through four essential qualities: As a patriot, a dissenter, a leader, and a statesman.
The Secret History of Bigfoot
By O'connor, John
From the shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest to off-the-wall cryptozoological conventions, one man searches high and low for the answer to the question: real or not, why do we want to believe?Journalist and writer John O'Connor takes readers on a narrative quest through the American wilds in search of Bigfoot, its myth and meaning. Inhabited by an eccentric cast of characters - reputable men of science and deluded charlatans alike - the book explores the zany and secretive world of "cryptozoology," tracking Bigfoot from the Wild Men of Native American and European lore to Harry and the Hendersons, while examining the forces behind our ever-widening belief in the supernatural. By turns an ardent, philosophical defense of nature, investigation into what Kurt Andersen calls our peculiar "American appetites for immersive make-believe," and a gonzo trip into alternative reality, this is the story of our Bigfoot obsession - where it comes from, what it means today - and the people driving it.
The Deerfield Massacre
By Swanson, James L.
In the tradition of the New York Times bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon comes a spellbinding account of a forgotten chapter in American history: the deadly confrontation between Native Americans and colonists in Massachusetts in 1704 and the tragic saga that unfolded, written by acclaimed historian James Swanson.. Once it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten. In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England - the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade - known to early Americans as "The Old Indian Door" - constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from the most dramatic moment in colonial American history: Leap Year, February 29, 1704, a cold, snowy night when hundreds of native Americans and their French allies swept down upon an isolated frontier outpost and ruthlessly slaughtered its inhabitants.
The Age of Revolutions
By Perl-rosenthal, Nathan
A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand. The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown - from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun - he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story.
Loved Egyptian Night
By Roberts, Hugh
Why did the Arab Spring have such calamitous outcomes?. Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 and what it led to amounted to a political revolution.. But the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria - countries with quite different histories and political traditions - were never revolutions. As Hugh Roberts explains, the bitter ends of these episodes were inscribed in their misunderstood beginnings. To celebrate these uprisings as 'revolutions' preempts and inhibits critical analysis and expresses an abdication of intellectual responsibility.. After so much wishful thinking, what remains is the debris of a cynical pretension.
Life After Power
By Cohen, Jared
New York Times bestselling author of Accidental Presidents explores what happens after the most powerful job in the world: President of the United States. Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington's departure after two terms made him "the greatest character of the age." But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might "[wander] among the people like ghosts." They were both right. Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life. Thomas Jefferson was the first former president to accomplish great things after the White House, shaping public debates and founding the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he included on his tombstone, unlike his presidency.