American History

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED: A RECK

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED: A RECK

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This "important and timely" (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America--and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Winner of the Stowe Prize

Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

How to Be an Antiracist

How to Be an Antiracist

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a "groundbreaking" (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society--and in ourselves.

"The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind."--The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism--and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas--from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities--that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

How We Get Free : Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

How We Get Free : Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

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"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free." --Combahee River Collective Statement

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk

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From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime--"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless" (The New York Times Book Review).

"One of the best books Baldwin has ever written--perhaps the best of all." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions--affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

In Sacred Places

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In Sacred Relationship: A Spiritual Compass for Today's Turbulent Times Inspired by Lakota Wisdom

In Sacred Relationship: A Spiritual Compass for Today's Turbulent Times Inspired by Lakota Wisdom

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In Sacred Relationship provides a new spiritual compass, assisting us in navigating today's turbulent world and finding sacredness in everyday life. The idea for the book grew out of the author's experience with Lakota Indian spirituality. The book offers a fresh approach, helping us cope with the spiritual realities surrounding the current Coronavirus Pandemic, cancer, economic crisis, and many other challenges facing today's world. Don Iannone is an interfaith minister dedicated to helping others find spiritual wisdom, direction, and wholeness. After three decades in the economic development and environmental fields, Don now works as a complementary medicine and spiritual caregiver with cancer patients and their families at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of 11 books and many academic and professional articles. His educational background includes a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology, graduate studies in Economic Development, Master's degree in Mind-Body Medicine, and Master and Doctor of Divinity degrees. He also holds clinical certifications in Reiki, meditation, mindfulness, and life purpose coaching. Don lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Mary. They have two sons and grandsons.

In Their Path: A Grandmother's 519-Mile Underground Railroad Walk

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In April 2002, Joan Southgate stepped off from the small town of Ripley, Ohio, with a simple goal: She wanted to highlight the courage and resourcefulness of the American slave and conductor families who risked so much for freedom. She called her effort In Their Path! and set out to increase awareness of a moment in history when people came together across color, creed and class to do freedom's work. Her journey has taken her 519 miles across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Canada. From schoolchildren to community groups, bank president to truck driver, her inspiring story and message of unity has resonated over the miles. Her walk has ended, but her mission -- to help heal the wounds of slavery and celebrate examples of interracial harmony -- continues.

Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

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New York Times Bestseller

Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck

Recipient of the American Book Award

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them."

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic

Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic

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In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as "mandingas," were used across Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers' experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical to conceptualizing Black Atlantic art history. Ultimately, Rarey looks to the archives of transatlantic slavery, which were meant to erase Black life, for objects like the mandingas that were created to protect it.
Journals  of  the  Lewis  &  Clark  Expedition  (13  volumes)

Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (13 volumes)

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A Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Gary E. Moulton, Editor; Thomas W. Dunlay, Assistant Editor; 13 volumes, 1986-2001. Volume 1: atlas, no DJ as issued, folio size; covers lightly faded; Volumes 2-4: second edition; DJ in protective covers; octavo; Volumes 5-13: first edition; DJ in protective covers; octavo, except for volume 12, Herbarium of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, which is quarto.

All volumes in very good condition showing minimal wear, except volume 1 as noted above. VG/VG