|
History and Current EventsFebruary 2015
|
Image courtesy of Digital Forsyth "At age sixty I was ordered to serve as a porter for a white person in a New York hotel, at age eighty to hang up a white guest’s coat at a Washington club where I was not an employee but a member." ~ John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), American historian, Mirror to America
|
|
New and Recently Released!
|
|
|
The Teacher Wars : A History of America's Most Embattled Profession
by Dana Goldstein
Author Goldstein traces 175 years of teaching in America to demonstrate how educators have characteristically endured shifting and often impossible expectations. By comparing the practices and test scores of other nations the book reveals the cultural and political factors compromising education today.
|
|
| When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill ManningDuring World War II, when American soldiers needed the morale boost that reading can supply, the War Department commissioned the production and shipment of over 1,300 titles in editions that fit into uniform pockets. The books included everything from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to collections of popular comic strips to Plato. In When Books Went to War, author Molly Guptill Manning vividly details not only the Armed Services Editions project but the troops' responses to the books, recounted in letters home and later recollections. This fascinating slice of history will captivate both book lovers and World War II buffs. |
|
| God'll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a... by John SafranIn 2010, a year after documentary maker John Safran interviewed white supremacist Robert Barrett, Barrett was murdered by a black man. Assuming the crime was racially motivated, Safran went to Jackson, Mississippi to learn more about the killer and his victim, only to discover that race wasn't the dominant factor. As he interviewed people, the Jewish Australian broadcaster felt like a fish out of water, continually surprised by wildly conflicting theories and unexpected responses to Barrett's death. God'll Cut You Down details Safran's riveting, confusing, and sometimes hilarious investigation. Readers who were beguiled by John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will find Safran's book equally absorbing. |
|
| America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder by Bret StephensIn this thought-provoking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens argues that the United States needs to increase its international engagement, instead of decreasing it as has been the case over the past decade. Reviewing the history of American isolationism and its consequences, he also cautions against a position of American domination of (and responsibility for) the whole world. Stephens suggests that the U.S. should take on a more moderate role of keeping international order. While many will find his proposals controversial, this well reasoned discussion offers "especially timely reading" (Publishers Weekly) for anyone interested in foreign policy. |
|
Black History Month: A Century of Black Life, History and Culture
|
|
During the month of February, the Forsyth County Public Library system will host programs and activities that highlight history, tradition and culture, designed for all ages. Highlights include: Clemmons Branch Library will present FEEL THE FUNK: Films about Black Musicians, Monday Feb.16th starting at 4pm. Reynolda Manor and Rural Hall will also have African American film screenings throughout the month. Our Southside Branch Library will be hosting a North Carolina Humanities Council Road Scholar Speaker, Dr. Benjamin Filene. Dr. Filene is Director of Public History and Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Where is Tobe? Unfolding Stories of Childhood, Race and Rural Life,- Feb. 12th at 11 am. Dr. Filene introduces Tobe: A Six-Year-Old Farmer, the 1939 book of photographs of rural life based in Hillsborough, NC. *
|
|
Focus on: African American History |
|
| The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations by Ira BerlinThis 400-year history of the African-American experience traces four pivotal migrations: the transatlantic slave trade; the relocation of slaves from the coast to antebellum Southern plantations; the "great migration" of black Americans from the rural South to industrial cities in the North; and, since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. Historian Ira Berlin focuses on how these movements -- both forced and voluntary -- have shaped African-American history and culture, and his book provides an "insightful meditation on the physical and cultural journeys" (Kirkus Reviews) of African Americans. |
|
| The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through... by Medgar Wiley Evers; Myrlie Evers-Williams and Manning Marable, editorsThe Autobiography of Medgar Evers depicts his life and his work with the NAACP in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. Evers himself didn't have a chance to write his life story, since an assassin's bullet cut his life short in the midst of his efforts to promote voting rights for African Americans. This book, therefore, consists of letters, speeches, telegrams, and other documents, with background and contextual commentary by historian Manning Marable and Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams. It offers an informative, moving, and sobering account of civil rights work in the Deep South along with a portrait of Evers as a family man and diligent NAACP Field Secretary. |
|
|
The Empire of Necessity : Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
by Greg Grandin
The author of Fordlandia documents an extraordinary early 19th-century event that inspired Herman Melville's Beneto Cereno. Grandin traces the cultural, economic and religious clashes that occurred aboard a distressed Spanish ship of West African captives who rebel and kill the crew and take the captain hostage. When a New England sealing ship comes across the drifting ship, events lead up to an unleashing of bloody violence.
|
|
| Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New... by Gilbert KingIn this riveting account of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's criminal defense work early in his legal career, author Gilbert King depicts a 1949 rape case whose ramifications went well beyond the courthouse to lynching and general destruction in the black community of Groveland, Florida. Devil in the Grove, which won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize, vividly depicts the racism and corruption that ruled parts of the South after World War II. For more on white bigotry in the 20th-century South, read David Beasley's Without Mercy. |
|
| Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven WilderBeginning in colonial times, American colleges and universities often relied on the financial benefits of slavery and promoted the view that Africans and Native Americans were inferior to Europeans. In Ebony & Ivy, historian Craig Steven Wilder details the strong connection between practices that supported white superiority and the economic and social success of leading schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This thoroughly documented, absorbing account offers a thought-provoking and arresting reassessment of the history of American higher education. |
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
Forsyth County Public Library 201 North Chestnut Street Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27101 336-703-2665www.forsythlibrary.org |
|
|
|