Slavery in America

Slavery in America

By: Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneuder 

Africans knew slavery long before Europeans sailed to their shores. They enslaved their enemies and their criminals. Sometimes they enslaved debtors. Like all other peoples in the long history of slavery, Africans enslaved outsiders members of other tribes or erring members of their own tribes. Slavery became an integral part of Africa’s economic organization. According to slave trader Theodore Canot, “The financial genius of Africa, instead of devising bank-notes or the precious metals as a circulating medium, has from time immemorial declared that a human creature the true representative and embodiment of labour, is the most valuable article on earth.”  The slave system was both entrenched and widespread. No one will ever know how many Africans owned how many slaves in the early days, but scholars speculate that in the late 19th century, a majority of Africans were either slaves or the descendants of slaves. [download]

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The Power of Looks

The Power of Looks 

By: Bonnie Berry

Turning the page of the newspaper, I saw the double full-page advertisement, in color, for a department store. The picture was of four people, one woman and three men. They were extraordinarily attractive, white, young, and apparently financially successful. The woman was lounging on the hood and windshield of a mint condition vintage convertible Mercedes, wearing a short dress which was well above her knees and with her long blonde hair flowing over the top of the windshield. The three men, all showing perfect white teeth, were casually but elegantly dressed. In the back of the Mercedes was a beautiful wooden canoe, spotless and shiny. The setting was idyllic. The people were in a wooded area with a very inviting lake behind them, apparently about to enjoy an outing in their canoe. [download]

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Shelley’s Goddess

Shelley’s Goddess 

By: Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

After the birth of his first child, lanthe, the story goes, Shelley was beside himself with anxiety because Harriet Shelley refused to nurse the baby herself and insisted on hiring a wet nurse. In the account recorded by Newman Ivey White, Shelley’s concern was that “the nurse’s soul would enter the child.” Walking up and down the room with the infant in his arms, he crooned nursery songs to her, expostulating with Harriet at the same time about her decision. “At last, in his despair, and thinking that the passion in him would make a miracle, he pulled his shirt away and tried himself to suckle the child” (1,326). White suggests that Thomas Trotter’s View of the Nervous Temperament (1806), which Shelley had ordered from his bookseller Thomas Hookham only a few months earlier (in December 1812), put this notion in his mind. [download]  

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Omaha Beach Head

Omaha Beach Head 

By: American Forces in Action Series 

Two YEARS of planning and preparation led up to the Allied landings inNormandyon 6 June 1944. British and American staffs had to work out every foreseeable detail for an undertaking that would involve the major military resources of the two Allied powers; immense stocks of shipping, aircraft, and supplies were assembled in theBritish Islesin an effort that taxed the war industries of both countries; before D Day the Allied air forces had carried out several months of bombing operations which were an integral part of the invasion itself. The first decisions were strategic in the broadest sense, since the opening of a front in Western Europe had to be considered in reference to over-all Allied plans for offensive operations against Germany, as well as the developments of the war in Russiaand of the war against Japan. [download]

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Brutal

Brutal 

By: Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas

By South Bostonstandards, my childhood was surprisingly normal. I grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project, the fifth in a family of six kids, with two older brothers, two older sisters, and one younger sister. The odds were good with a family of six in Southie that one would run afoul of the law. I was that one. Our apartment on 8 Pilsudski Way, apartment 554, was about 1,200 square feet, with four small bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen. My par­ents were in one bedroom; we three boys were in the other. My older sis­ter Maureen had her own bedroom, and Patty and Karen shared theirs. I was born on March 21, 1956, and, at fifty, am two years older than Karen, who is the youngest of the six of us. Billy, at fifty-eight, is the old­est. [download]

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A Women of Valour

A Women of Valour 

By: Claire Trepanier

When my daughter, Louise, came to me three years ago with the idea that her friend Claire might be interested in writing a story about my mother, I felt strange and frightened. Everything in my early family life had been a secret for so long that I felt it was more than I could handle to accept to do the project. But the story of what my mother had gone through and everything she did to survive should be told. In doing her research and interviewing me, Claire was so patient and understanding. Now that the book is finished, I feel relieved: after all these years, the things that were bottled up are now out in the open. It has taken a load off my mind, and I feel a sense of release. So much has gone on with the Catholic Church that has disturbed people’s lives … it is time to come out in the open. [download]

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Like Me

Like Me 

By: Chely Wright

Dear God, please don’t let me be gay. I promise to be a good person. I promise not to lie. I promise not to steal. I promise to always believe in you. I promise to do all the things you ask me to do. Please take it away. In your name I pray. Amen. I said this prayer every single day of my life since the third grade. The words changed over the years, but the sentiment remained the same. The prayer was as much a part of me as my brown eyes, my long toes, and the chicken pox scar in the middle of my forehead. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t believe in God. And I hardly remember a time when I didn’t know I was different. Slowly, I would learn that difference was something to be hated and feared. For most of my thirty-nine years, I’ve hidden my sexuality because I thought I had to. I was a small-town girl with a dream of moving to Nashvilleand becoming a famous country singer. The dream came true. But for all my success, I was left wrestling with a secret that could destroy everything I’d built. For decades, I swore I’d take that secret to my grave. Even as I write this. [download]

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The Big Burn

The Big Burn 

By: Timothy Egan

HERE NOW CAME the fire down from the BitterrootMountainsand showered embers and forest shrapnel onto the town that was supposed to be protected by all those men with faraway accents and empty stomachs. For days, people had watched it from their gabled houses, from front porches and ash-covered streets, and there was some safety in the distance, some fascination even see there, way up on the ridgeline, just candles flickering in the trees. But now it was on them, an element transformed from Out There to Here, and just as suddenly on their front lawns, in their hair, snuffing out the life of a drunk on a hotel mattress, torching a veranda. The sky had been dark for some time on this Saturday in August 1910, the town covered in a warm fog so opaque that the lights were turned on at three o’clock in the afternoon. [download]

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Star of Courage

Star of Courage

By: John Melady

ALMOST THIRTY YEARS ago, the Government of Canada created a series of bravery decorations for deserving individuals. Prior to that, gallantry medals of various kinds were awarded here, but more often than not, such decorations originated outside the country, and the majority were intended for military personnel, most of whom were male. The best known was the Victoria Cross, and although awarded to ninety-three Canadians, was a decoration whose origin was elsewhere; Queen Victoriainstituted it in 1856, and today it is a Commonwealth medal. The Canadian bravery decorations were first given out in 1972, and since then have brought recognition and honour to those who have performed outstanding acts of heroism. [download]

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Flying Canucks

Flying Canucks 

By: Peter Piggot

For most of its existence, this country has been identified with one form of transportation or another. The birchbark canoe, the steam locomotive, and at the dawn of this century, flimsy contraptions held together with wire and muslin … all were pivotal to our national identity. This book is not a comprehensive collection of biographies of Canadians who pioneered aviation or aspired to do so. It focuses on a certain phase in our history barely one lifetime that of the evolution of aviation inCanada. On one level, the men and women chosen took a piece of applied science and changed our country forever. It has not been possible, even with the most diligent searching, to document fully the lives of several aviators and it would be futile to analyze why they embarked on the courses that they did. [download]

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The Boy Who Lost His Birthday

The Boy Who Lost His Birthday

By: Laszlo Berkowitz and Robert W. Kenny 

Many memoirs of the Holocaust have been published; they number easily in the hundreds. The smallest sampling of them will suggest the unique horror of that most depraved episode of human experience. At the same time, even taken all together they cannot encompass the scale of its horror. Each survivor has carried individual and particular memories that could illuminate another dark corner that could contribute something more to a universal understanding of what will always stand as a central event of the twentieth century. With the liberation of the death camps now more than half a century in the past, time is now the enemy of history. It becomes easier and easier to live in ignorance of events that most of the world’s population is too young to remember. [download]

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Quarriers Story

Quarriers Story 

By: Anna Magnusson

It all began more than 150 years ago in a small street within sight and sound of the docks ofGreenock. It was there, in a close offCross Shore Streeta narrow lane running down the quayside where lighters loaded their cargo, and steamboats fromGlasgowdisgorged their passengers that William Quarrier was born on 29 September 1829. Greenock, onScotland’s Firth of Clyde, was in 1829 a busy industrial town with an illustrious shipbuilding history. Scott’s Shipbuilding and Engineering Company of Greenock, founded in 1711, was one of the many companies which helped to make Greenock the centre of shipbuilding on theClydeduring the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century new shipbuilding centres had developed further up the Clyde, notably at Port Glasgow and Dumbarton, but Greenock was still the chief highway to the Atlantic, and every day great oceangoing liners anchored out at the Tail o’ the Bank. [download]

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All But The Waltz

All But The Waltz 

By: Mary Clearman Blew

In t he sagebrush to the north of the mountains in central Montana, where the Judith River deepens its channel and threads a slow, treacherous current between the cutbanks, a cottonwood log house still stands. It is in sight of the highway, about a mile downriver on a gravel road. From where I have turned off and stopped my car on the sunlit shoulder of the highway, I can see the house, a distant and solitary dark interruption of the sagebrush. I can even see the lone box elder tree, a dusty green shade over what used to be the yard. I know from experience that if I were to keep driving over the cattle guard and follow the gravel road through the sage and alkali to the log house, I would find the windows gone and the door sagging and the floor rotting away. [download]

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The Games Do Count

The Games Do Count 

By: Brian Kilmeade

We’ve all read the stories about sports legends like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and John Elway. How they rose from humble beginnings and managed through hard work to turn their prodigious natural talents into fame, fortune, and incredible accomplishment. But there are other untold sports stories out there stories about everyday athletes, talented, average, or otherwise, who turned their sports experiences into the lessons of a lifetime. Such stories are almost universal; many, many people have learned such lessons. The people in this book are anything but average. In fact, every one of them has taken something very special with them from their early years playing sports whether it be baseball, football, wrestling, boxing, soccer, golf, horseback riding, or basketball and parlayed it into outstanding success in life. [download]

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Counselor

Counselor 

By: Ted Sorensen

I was born inLincoln,Nebraska, on the morning of May 8, 1928, Harry Truman’s forty-fourth birthday. Harry took no notice of my arrival, being a busy county judge in Missouriat the time. More than twenty years later, I would make my way to Washington, D.C., where my first employer was the federal government over which he presided. I was born in a Catholic hospital, where my Jewish mother, Annis Chaikin Sorensen, valued the loving care of the nuns on the hospital staff. My father, Christian A. Sorensen (“C.A.”), an insurgent Republican making his first run for public office that year, wrote to the head of America’s “Hoover Booster Clubs”: “Our family was increased this morning by another son. I am going to have a Republican club of my own.” [download]

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Emily Murphy: Rebel

Emily Murphy: Rebel

By: Christine Mander

Emily Murphy is a woman for all seasons. I say “is” because I hope, through this book, to keep the spirit of “Janey Canuck” alive that same spirit which Byrne Hope Sanders introduced to the world in her biography many years ago. Emily had no qualms about her place in the world, no problem identifying her aims, and above all no reticence about communicating her strong beliefs and cogent sense of responsibility to her fellow men and women. She was a believer in action; she was persuasive with words; she was a force to be reckoned with in whatever task she undertook, whether it was singing a child to sleep, being a helpmate to her husband, or a hellion on the hustings. Her philosophy on how a woman should best tackle life was characterized by a strong thread of honest-to-goodness common sense which is as apt for the computer age as it was for the “Votes for Women” one in which she grew up. [download]

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First Among Friends

First Among Friends 

By: H. Larry Ingle 

George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, was a significant figure in the history of the Radical Reformation. But he was also more. He sensed a need for, then captured in his movement, the sense of individual responsibility and initiative without which the newly emerging world of capitalism would have had tougher going. His concerns were primarily religious, but he also stressed the secular needs of those left behind by the changing social order. Hence achieving justice, social and economic, was always one of his major intentions, especially in the heady days of the English Revolution. Articulating the spirit of his age, Fox at his most creative pushed the accepted definitions of Christianity to stress new individualistic dimensions and inculcate them in his sect. [download]

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Queen of The Oddballs

Queen of The Oddballs 

By: Hillary Carlip

What do you do when you feel so invisible you can’t sleep without a light on, afraid that in the dark you just might vanish entirely? Simple. Become someone interesting enough to be noticed. And that’s exactly what I did when I was eight years old. I took on different personas the way other kids tried on clothes. I Frugged and Mashed Potatoed incessantly for an entire month when I was being a go-go dancer from Hullabaloo! After that, for several weeks I yanked my short hair into pigtails, wore all black, and skulked around the house and school, acting “creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky,” when I was being Wednesday from The Addams Family. A few months later, hooked on Gerry and the Pacemakers, I sang and spoke only in an English accent. How much more interesting could I get? [download]

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Between Poverty and The Pyre

Between Poverty and The Pyre 

By: Jan Bremmer and Laurens Van Den Bosch

Since time immemorial widows have been associated with notions of ambiguity. They often represented a marginal group and, unlike widowers, their lives were controlled by many rules. This marginality may explain the small amount of attention which they receive in scholarly research. This lack of interest induced us to organize a colloquium on the position of widows throughout the centuries in the Mediterraneanand western Europe and in those great religious traditions, Islam and Hinduism, which more and more are becoming a part of our own culture. We felt that the subject should be looked at from as many angles as possible and therefore invited historians, jurists, philologists, anthropologists, and theologians. The conference, which was held in Groningenin February 1992, was a great success and its proceedings will provide a basis for further historical and anthropological research into widowhood. [download]

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The Duke of Naxos

The Duke of Naxos

By: Cecil Roth

IN 1947, I completed a biography of Doña Gracia Nasi, one of the most remarkable figures of sixteenth century history and one of the outstanding Jewish women of all time. I intimated at the time that this volume would in due course be rounded off by a sequel dealing with the astonishing career of her nephew and son in-law, Joseph Nasi, Duke of Naxos. This is now presented to the reader. It is complete in itself, but should be read in conjunction with the other work, the two forming in fact successive parts of the same romantic history. As in Doña Gracia, I have given references to my sources only when they are difficult to find or have been overlooked by previous writers on the subject. They are most numerous in the last chapter, which I thought it desirable to round off with an account to a large extent entirely new of the Jewish statesmen at the Turkish court at the close of the sixteenth century, after Joseph Nasi’s fall. [download]

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