She championed the disadvantaged--black in the South, women in the North--yet spent much of her free life with middle-class whites, who supported her, yet never failed to remind her that she was a second class citizen. Slowly, but surely, Sojourner climbed from beneath the weight of slavery, secured respect for herself, and utilized the distinction of her race to become not only a symbol for black women, but for the feminist movement as a whole.

    Written as short monologues, each of these powerful, early works of autobiographical fiction is spoken in the voice of a character he stumbles upon during travels throughout America.

    From Aztec princess to slave and concubine, Hummingbird--or HuitzitzilAAn in her native Nahuatl--recounts her life during the Spanish conquest of Mexico to Father Benito, the priest who seeks to confess and convert her, to offer her an absolution she neither needs nor wants. Instead, she forces him to see the conquest, for the first time, through the eyes of the conquered. Other novels by Graciela Limon available from SPD include IN SEARCH OF BERNABE, THE DAY OF THE MOON, ERASED FACES, and THE MEMORIES OF ANA CALDERON.

    Examining the elite's supposed hegemony over intellectual work, Thinking Class rejects the ideaa that working class people are not thinkers, and affirms the culture that springs up, beautiful and honest, from this society's true base.

    Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

    Reel To Real collects hooks' classic essays on films such as Paris Is Burning or the infamous "Whose Pussy Is It" essay about Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, as well as newer work on Pulp Fiction, Crooklyn and Waiting To Exhale. hooks also examines the world of independent cinema. Conversations with filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Arthur Jaffa are linked with critical essays, including a piece on Larry Clark's Kids, to show that cinema can function subversively as well as maintain the status quo.

    Stewart, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University, takes the reader on an all-encompassing journey through the entirety of African-American history that is pithy, provocative, and encyclopedic in scope. Here are all the people, terms, ideas, events, and social processes that make African-American history such a fascinating and inspiring subject. 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African-American History covers all the significant information in six broad sections: Great Migrations; Civil Rights and Politics; Science, Inventions and Medicine; Sports; Military; Culture and Religion. It will entertain as well as instruct, and it can be read from beginning to end as well as opened at random and read at any length without confusion.A necessary addition to every family's library, 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African-American History presents African American history in a fun, engaging and intelligent way.

    Elegantly illustrated, Muskrat Will Be Swimming is a treasure for all who have dealt with the fear of being different. Full color.

    Filipina American debut author displays the contradictions of Asian American experience with irony & enthusiasm, anger & wit.

    A brilliant look at alternatives to capitalism

    Worlds apart from bureaucratic business unions like the AFL-CIO, these organizations emerged from workers involved in many kinds of labor, from African American nutpickers in St. Louis to chemical and rubber workers in Akron, and from bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta. The contributors draw on eyewitness interviews, first-person narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to describe experimental forms of worker activism during the period. This alternative unionism was democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based on egalitarianism. The cry, "We are all leaders!" resonated among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, though often overlooked by historians, has much to teach us about union organizing today. Contributors: John Borsos, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth Faue, Rosemary Feurer, Janet Irons, Michael Kozura, Mark D. Naison, Peter Rachleff, and Stan Weir

    They challenge arguments that expanding inequality is the natural, perhaps necessary, accompaniment of economic growth. They refute the claims of the incendiary bestseller The Bell Curve (1994) through a clear, rigorous re-analysis of the very data its authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, used to contend that inherited differences in intelligence explain inequality. Inequality by Design offers a powerful alternative explanation, stressing that economic fortune depends more on social circumstances than on IQ, which is itself a product of society. More critical yet, patterns of inequality must be explained by looking beyond the attributes of individuals to the structure of society. Social policies set the rules of the game within which individual abilities and efforts matter. And recent policies have, on the whole, widened the gap between the rich and the rest of Americans since the 1970s.Not only does the wealth of individuals' parents shape their chances for a good life, so do national policies ranging from labor laws to investments in education to tax deductions. The authors explore the ways that America--the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world--unevenly distributes rewards through regulation of the market, taxes, and government spending. It attacks the myth that inequality fosters economic growth, that reducing economic inequality requires enormous welfare expenditures, and that there is little we can do to alter the extent of inequality. It also attacks the injurious myth of innate racial inequality, presenting powerful evidence that racial differences in achievement are the consequences, not the causes, of social inequality. By refusing to blame inequality on an unchangeable human nature and an inexorable market--an excuse that leads to resignation and passivity--Inequality by Design shows how we can advance policies that widen opportunity for all.

    Aída Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aída Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men. For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group. A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer. Aída Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

    It examines these themes by exploring the intersections of `race', gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, generation and nationalism in different discourses, practices and political contexts. The first three chapters map the emergence of `Asian' as a racialized category in post-war British popular and political discourse and state practices. It documents Asian cultural and political responses paying particular attention to the role of gender and generation. The remaining six chapters analyse the debate on `difference', `diversity' and `diaspora' across different sites, but mainly within feminism, anti-racism, and post-structuralism.

    Mitchell's analysis appropriates the best of studies of representation while critiquing their abstraction from material production. All this while capturing the role of migrant workers in the making of the California landscape.

    But this mixed world did not last, and it eventually gave way to nineteenth-century commercial and industrial development. How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were not perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was not achieved, and the millennium that did not arrive. Seeking to explain why these dreams were not realized, Stephen Aron shows us what did happen during Kentucky's tumultuous passage from Daniel Boone's world to Henry Clay's.

    Joy Berry's down-to-earth approach shows children real ways to handle sadness over situations such as disappointment, separation, and loss. Like all of Joy Berry's books, Let's Talk About Feeling Sad speaks directly to the child and acts as a problem-solving resource for parents and caregivers. The book is filled with full-color illustrations and simple text that make the sometimes-difficult information easy to take in.

    The research in the book covers a wide range of topics, including the class character of friendship patterns, class mobility, the sexual division of labor in housework, gender differences in managerial authority, and class consciousness. What unites the topics is not a preoccupation with a common object of explanation, but rather a common explanatory factor: class.

    L.A. Weekly and The Free Press) into a nearly-seamless personal narrative: "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory".This book follows in the footsteps or freeway tracks of such classic Los Angeles portraitists as John Fante, Carey McWilliams, and Nathanael West, not missing the seamy side of town, or its caricature dimensions: "a glitter queen with 5 o'clock shadow whose lovers don't care what sins have been committed... Loving you is an S&M trip. You gave birth to me. And while I love you for that I hate you for the painful afterbirth... Loving your horizons while hating your gutters. Your obscenely glorious fall skies that redden as deeply as any earthbound passion. The sun a big luscious lick. A visual bliss ozoning. Soon to be followed by a moon to swoon for, heavy and broad like the exposed doughy thigh of a tired old Hollywood harlot".Coleman's tough-minded, high-voltage, straight-from-the-hip commentaries can be read as a manual on urban survival, a guide to navigating "the margins defined by poverty and race, presuming no escape". The object lesson in the tale is Coleman's own life -- a tale of grit and determination, of growing up black and poor in South Central L. A. ("I was big and dark and ugly in a world that did not value me") and living to tell about it. From piece to piece we find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, pink collar corporate slave, editorof a sleazy men's magazine, while caught up in militant revolutionary politics, or witnessing the Watts and Rodney King riots. The triumph implicit in the stow is Coleman's escape into her true calling, that of poetry.

    Brings together the words of welfare mothers, activists and advocates, as well as scholars in a poignant and powerful challenge to the impoverishment of women.

    As some activists have turned to regulation rather than education in the effort to curb the AIDS epidemic, the public culture at the foundation of queer culture has come under attack.

    It provides English speaking students and teachers with a comprehensive and accessible guide to French grammar. Praised for its clear lay-out and lucid explanations, this essential learning tool has now been revised in response to extensive feedback from teachers using the first edition. The improvements of the second edition include a through reworking of the index and cross-referencing, minor structural reorganisation of material, and updated examples.