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History and Current Events May 2021
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| We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy by Natalie BaszileWhat it is: an inspiring collection of interviews, essays, photographs, and poems chronicling Black farming in the United States, from the Emancipation to the present.
Why you should read it: Queen Sugar author Natalie Baszile's engaging and well-researched anthology pays tribute to an essential (but lesser-known) facet of American history. |
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| The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos by Judy BatalionWhat it's about: the courageous Jewish women resistance fighters operating in Poland during World War II.
Read it for: a propulsive and richly detailed account that's "sure to become part of the WWII canon" (Booklist).
Movie buzz: Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg has optioned The Light of Days for a film adaptation. |
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Churchill & son
by Josh Ireland
An intimate portrait of the World War II prime minister’s enduring but volatile relationship with his only son includes coverage of Churchill’s own complicated childhood and the impact of ambition, society and history on his son’s life. Illustrations.
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| Children Under Fire: An American Crisis by John Woodrow CoxWhat it is: a sobering study examining the traumatic impact of gun violence on children.
What's inside: heartwrenching profiles of survivors and those who've lost loved ones to gun violence; persuasive calls for gun reform backed by extensive research.
Book buzz: Children Under Fire is an expansion of reporter John Woodrow Cox's Pulitzer Prize-nominated Washington Post series. |
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Mixed plate : chronicles of an all-American combo
by Jo Koy
A laugh-out-loud, fearlessly honest memoir by the award-winning Filipino-American comedian uncovers the true family experiences behind his popular routines, discussing his mixed heritage, struggles with family mental illness and eventual embrace of his identity. 100,000 first printing.
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| The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights by Dorothy WickendenStarring: "co-conspirators and intimate friends" Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Coffin Wright, each of whom played a key role in the women's suffrage and abolitionist movements.
Read it for: an accessible and eye-opening history of the intersection of progressive causes in 19th-century America and the often unheralded women at the forefront of fighting for them. |
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Fears of a setting sun : the disillusionment of America's Founders
by Dennis C. Rasmussen
"Whatever sense of hope the Founder Fathers may have felt at the new government's birth, almost none of them carried that optimism to their graves. Franklin survived to see the Constitution in action for only a single year, but most of the founders who lived into the nineteenth century came to feel deep anxiety, disappointment, and even despair about the government and the nation that they had helped to create. Indeed, by the end of their lives many of the founders judged the Constitution that we now venerate to be an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. This book tells the story of their disillusionment. The book focuses principally on four of the preeminent figures of the period (1787): George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. These four lost their faith in the American experiment at different times and for different reasons, and each has his own unique story. As Rasmussen shows in a series of three chapters on each figure, Washington became disillusioned above all because of the rise of parties and partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was not sufficiently vigorous or energetic, Adams because he believed that the American people lacked the requisite civic virtue for republican government, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions brought on (as he saw it) by Northern attempts to restrict slavery and consolidate power in the federal government. Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson were the most prominent of the founders who grew disappointed in what America became, but they were certainly not the only ones. In a final chapter Rasmussen shows that most of the other leading founders-including figures such as Samuel Adams, John Jay, James Monroe, and Thomas Paine-fell in the same camp. The most notable founder who did not come to despair for his country was the one who outlived them all, James Madison. Madison did harbor some real worries but a final chapter also explores why Madison largely kept the republican faith when so many of his compatriots did not"
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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