Other books that might interest you

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  Under Jackie's Shadow - Voices...

  Mitchell Nathanson

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  The stories of thirteen Black Minor League baseball players during the post–Jackie Robinson era, from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, who were figuratively and literally left behind even as both baseball and the country claimed a newfound racial progressiveness.

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  The Famine Plot - England's Role...

  Tim Pat Coogan

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  During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated in what came to be known as Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Waves of hungry peasants fled across the Atlantic to the United States, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you could walk dry shod to America on their bodies." 
   
   
   
  In this sweeping history, Ireland's best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, tackles the dark history of the Irish Famine and argues that it constituted one of the first acts of genocide. In what the Boston Globe calls "his greatest achievement," Coogan shows how the British government hid behind the smoke screen of laissez faire economics, the invocation of Divine Providence, and a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, allowing more than a million people to die agonizing deaths and driving a further million into emigration. 
   
   
   
  Unflinching in depicting the evidence, Coogan presents a vivid and horrifying picture of a catastrophe that shook the nineteenth century and finally calls to account those responsible.

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  The Birth of Anarchism - 1849-1887

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail...

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  Mankind can rule itself without the force of top-down authority, and freedom is more than just choosing how to meet the needs and demands of capital. Inequality is structural and intentional, not inevitable and necessary.  
  It does not have to be this way. In solidarity, we are better. 
  Think for yourself, and question authority. 
  This is the essence of anarchism, which has a bad name and reputation because it attacks the necessity of centralised power and authority. The media archetype is Tyler Durden, filled with violence and nihilism – yet anarchism is the most positive of political philosophies, one that Jesus and Buddha both preached, stating that empathy and a rejection of authority were key to human flourishing. Neither would disagree with most early anarchists. 
  Proudhon, whose “property is robbery” is perhaps the most well-known anarchist slogan, lays out the conceptual foundation for key anarchist ideas. He argues that usury (charging interest) is a fundamental harm to society, that there is enough for everyone if we simply take other values to be higher than capital gain, that mutualism is inevitable, and that all governments and ideologies make the same mistake, in trying to change society from the top. Positive change must arise from the great masses of humanity, not from their rulers. 
  Bakunin's speeches are about solidarity arising from the masses, and the ground for a global reconfiguration. 
  Louis Lingg was convicted to death with six others, for being one of the ‘Chicago Anarchists’. They were executed to make a political point, based on corrupted evidence and perjury. His statement is one of contempt for the powers that be, and his belief that mankind should be free and should fight until it is. 
  We end with Kropotkin, who firmly believed in decentralized society. He believed that the greatest strength of mankind lies in the masses, not their rulers, and exhorts us to “Act for Yourselves”.

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  A Cancelled Teacher:

  Doc King Cole

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  Doc King Cole is a veteran teacher of twenty years. His journey of teaching in three states and 12 schools are reflected here. In his first volume his early years of teaching in the late 1990s provided adventures in unconventional teaching techniques. In this volume, the early 2000s are visited with passion, vigor, and honesty. Here he identifies many problems faced and possible solutions to school violence, school administrators, state testing, and the penal-education complex.

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  Women of Grace

  Ph.D. Carol Lee Flinders

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  If Saint Teresa of Avila were alive today, would she be running for public office? If Julian of Norwich were around, would she be completing a doctorate in psychoneuroimmunology? Would Saint Clare of Assisi run a nonprofit? Would any of these women choose a cloistered life if they were born today? Flinders traces the “mother-line” of centuries-past holy women.

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  America's First Great Eclipse -...

  Steve Ruskin

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  America’s First Great Eclipse takes readers on a thrilling historical journey, revealing that nineteenth-century Americans were just as excited about a total solar eclipse as we are today ... and, like us, were willing to travel thousands of miles to see it. 
  The ‘Great American Eclipse’ of 2017 and the upcoming ‘Great North American Eclipse’ of 2024 were not the first eclipses to deserve such titles. In the summer of 1878, when the American West was still wild, hundreds of astronomers and thousands of tourists traveled by train to Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas to witness America’s first ‘Great Eclipse.’  
  America’s First Great Eclipse tells the story of a country, and its scientists, on the brink of a new era. Near the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States was barely a hundred years old, American astronomers were taking the lead in a science that Europeans had dominated for centuries. Scientists like Samuel Langley, Henry Draper, Maria Mitchell, and even the inventor Thomas Edison, were putting America at the forefront of what was being called the “new astronomy.” 
  On July 29, 1878, having braved treacherous storms, debilitating altitude sickness, and the threat of Indian attacks, they joined thousands of East-coast tourists and Western pioneers as they spread out across the Great Plains and climbed to the top of 14,000-foot Pikes Peak, all to glimpse one of nature’s grandest spectacles: a total solar eclipse. It was the first time in history so many astronomers observed together from higher elevations. The Rocky Mountain eclipse of 1878 was not only a turning point in American science, but it was also the beginning of high-altitude astronomy, without which our current understanding of the Universe would be impossible.

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