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History and Current Events April 2020
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Franchise : the golden arches in black America
by Marcia Chatelain
Traces the lesser-known history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America, revealing how unexpected collaborations among franchises, black capitalists and civil rights leaders provided effective economic responses to racial inequality.
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Killer high : a history of war in six drugs
by Peter Andreas
" There is growing alarm over how drugs increasingly empower terrorists, insurgents, traffickers, and gangs. But by looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries. In his path-breaking Killer High, Andreas shows how six psychoactive drugs--ranging from old to relatively new, mild to potent, licit to illicit, natural to synthetic--have proven to be particularly important war ingredients. This sweeping history tells the story of war from antiquity to the modern age through the lens of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, opium, amphetamines, and cocaine. Beer and wine drenched ancient and medieval battlefields, and the distilling revolution lubricated the conquest and ethnic cleansing of the New World. Tobacco became globalized through soldiering, with soldiers hooked on smoking and governments hooked on taxing it. Caffeine and opium fueled imperial expansion and warfare. The commercialization of amphetamines in the twentieth century energized soldiers to fight harder, longer, and faster, while cocaine stimulated an increasingly militarized drug war that produced casualty numbers surpassing most civil wars. As Andreas demonstrates, armed conflict has become progressively more "drugged" with the introduction, mass production, and global spread of mind-altering substances. As a result, we cannot understand the history of war without including drugs, and we similarly cannot understand the history of drugs without including war. From ancient brews and battles to meth and modern warfare, drugs and war have grown up together and become addicted to each other. "
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World peace : and how we can achieve it
by Alex J. Bellamy
For as long as there has been war, there have been demands for its elimination. The quest for world peace has excited and eluded political leaders, philosophers, religious elders, activists, and artists for millennia. With war on the rise once again, we rarely reflect nowadays on what world peace might look like; much less on how it might be achieved.
World Peace aims to change all that and show that world peace is possible. Because the motives, rationales, and impulses that give rise to war - the quest for survival, enrichment, solidarity, and glory - are now better satisfied through peaceful means, war is an increasingly anachronistic practice, more likely to impoverish and harm us humans than satisfy and protect us. This book shows that we already have many of the institutions and practices needed to make peace possible and sets out an agenda for building world peace. In the immediate term, it shows how steps to strengthen compliance with international law, improve collective action such as international peacekeeping and peacebuilding, better regulate the flow of arms, and hold individuals legally accountable for acts of aggression or atrocity crimes can make our world more peaceful. It also shows how in the long term, building strong and legitimate states that protect the rights and secure the livelihoods of their people, gender equal societies, and protecting the right of individuals to opt-out of wars has the potential to establish and sustain world peace. But it will only happen, if individuals organize to make it happen.
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Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by David Zucchino
What it's about: the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, when white supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina stoked racist ire to overthrow the city's mixed-race government and disenfranchise thousands of black citizens, killing an estimated 60 black people.
Why you should read it: Drawing upon numerous primary sources including diaries and witness testimonies, Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino's sobering and resonant history rightly corrects the historical record -- for decades, the coup was viewed as a race riot instigated by Wilmington's black population.
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The Birth and Death of the Cool
by Ted Gioia
It’s hard to imagine that “the cool” could ever go out of style. After all, cool is style. Isn’t it? And it may be harder to imagine a world where people no longer aspire to coolness. In this intriguing cultural history, nationally acclaimed author Ted Gioia shows why cool is not a timeless concept and how it has begun to lose meaning and fade into history. Gioia deftly argues that what began in the Jazz Age and became iconic in the 1950s with Miles Davis, James Dean, and others has been manipulated, stretched, and pushed to a breaking point—not just in our media, entertainment, and fashion industries, but also by corporations, political leaders, and social institutions. Tolling the death knell for the cool, this thought-provoking book reveals how and why a new cultural tone is emerging, one marked by sincerity, earnestness, and a quest for authenticity.
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Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
What it is: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists (and spouses) Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's compassionate examination of the forces contributing to the decline of America's working class.
Chapters include: "When Jobs Disappear;" "Drug Dealers in Lab Coats;" "Homeless in a Rich Nation."
Media buzz: A companion documentary premiered at the DOC NYC Film Festival in November 2019.
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| Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings by James CrawfordWhat it is: an engaging, millennia-spanning survey of 20 ruined structures that offers a revealing glimpse at the civilizations that built and destroyed them.
Sites "visited:" the Library of Alexandria; the Tower of Babel; Old St. Paul's Cathedral; the Berlin Wall; the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, the World Trade Center.
Don't miss: author James Crawford's ode to the "deleted city" -- web hosting site GeoCities, which shuttered in 2009. |
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Landmark : A History of Britain in 50 Buildings
by Anna Keay
This engaging and sumptuously illustrated book celebrates the Landmark Trust's achievement in the protection of British heritage since the Trust was established 50 years ago. From a medieval hall house to the winner of the 2013 Stirling Prize for Architecture, 50 buildings rescued by Landmark from threatened oblivion are presented here that vividly illustrate the history of Britain from 1250 to the present day. Presented in the order in which they were built, the selected buildings include the unusual, the fantastic, the spectacular, the utilitarian and the enchanting, each one offering a fascinating glimpse into the past of the British people. In telling the stories of how the buildings came to be, how they were used and how they were adapted by subsequent generations, this book brings history to life through the evidence in the buildings our ancestors have left behind. Examples include a 15th-century inn in Suffolk, an Elizabethan hospital in Yorkshire, a lighthouse on Lundy and an Italianate railway station. The Landmark Trust's often heroic rescue of each of these buildings is also placed in the context of the Trust's own evolution to date and the history of British conservation practice. For everyone interested in British history or architecture, this enthralling book will bring fresh insights into both; for everyone interested in buildings conservation, the book will provide an insight into the unique national treasure that is the Landmark Trust.
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| The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House by Norman EisenWelcome to...Prague's Petschek Villa, built by Jewish banker Otto Petschek in the 1920s and home to U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen nearly a century later.
What it's about: how the palatial estate survived Nazi and Soviet occupation thanks to the residents who fought to save it from destruction.
Residents included: Rudolf Toussaint, the Nazi-hating German general who defied orders to burn Petschek Villa; Shirley Temple Black, who witnessed 1989's Velvet Revolution while serving as an ambassador. |
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| Washington's Monument: And the Fascinating History of the Obelisk by John Steele GordonWhat it is: an engaging history of Washington, D.C.'s Washington Monument, which took nearly 40 years to build and is, at 555 feet, the world's tallest stone structure (and the "tallest structure, by law," in the United States capital).
Did you know? In 1855, members of the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party successfully halted the project for three years because Pope Pius IX had donated a commemorative stone to the construction efforts.
Don't miss: an entertaining micro-history of ancient Egypt's famous obelisks on which the Washington Monument is modeled. |
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| The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont by Shawn LevyWhat it's about: the iconic Los Angeles hotel Chateau Marmont, which for nearly a century has attracted celebrities to its secluded bungalows for all manner of decadence and debauchery.
Want a taste? "Chateau Marmont is the ultimate Hollywood hotel because it is, like Hollywood itself, bigger than life even when it is obviously fake."
Try this next: For another dishy history of a storied hotel, try Julie Satow's The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Iredell County Public Library 201 North Tradd Street Statesville, North Carolina 28677 704-878-3090www.iredell.lib.nc.us/ |
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