Book picks similar to
Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools by Ronald Niezen
non-fiction
truth-and-reconciliation
canada
politics
Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism
Noenoe K. Silva - 2004
Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.
Haitian Revolution: A History From Beginning to End
Hourly History - 2016
The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint Domingue, when a group of slaves rebelled in order to secure their freedom and the end of slavery. In the midst of the French Revolution, slaves took advantage of volatile political, racial, and social circumstances. Inside you will read about... ✓ The French Colony of Saint Domingue ✓ Race and Class in Saint Domingue: The Coming of Revolution ✓ The French Revolution in Saint Domingue ✓ The Haitian Revolution Breaks Out ✓ The Haitian Revolution and the World ✓ Napoleon ✓ The Continuing Struggle for Freedom And much more! With legendary leaders like Toussaint Louverture, they eventually defeated Napoleon’s France to form the independent nation of Haiti. The Haitian Revolution had both global causes and consequences. In the end, the entire world was impacted by the heroic actions of the most dispossessed people in the population.
Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact
Inga Clendinnen - 2005
Dancing with Strangers tells the story of what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and these Aborigines. Inga Clendinnen interprets the earliest written sources, and the reports, letters and journals of the first British settlers in Australia. She reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader 'Bennelong' (Baneelon) that was ultimately destroyed by the assertion of profound cultural differences. A Prize-winning archaeologist, anthropologist and historian of ancient Mexican cultures, Inga Clendinnen has spent most of her teaching career at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan (Cambridge, 1989) and Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1995) are two of her best-known scholarly works; Tiger's Eye: A Memoir, (Scribner, 2001) describes her battle against liver cancer. Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2002) explores World War II genocide from various perspectives.
Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America
Jeffrey L. Stout - 2010
But thousands of others are not ready to give up on democracy just yet. Working outside the notice of the national media, ordinary citizens across the nation are meeting in living rooms, church basements, synagogues, and schools to identify shared concerns, select and cultivate leaders, and take action. Their goal is to hold big government and big business accountable. In this important new book, Jeffrey Stout bears witness to the successes and failures of progressive grassroots organizing, and the daunting forces now arrayed against it.Stout tells vivid stories of people fighting entrenched economic and political interests around the country. From parents and teachers striving to overcome gang violence in South Central Los Angeles, to a Latino priest north of the Rio Grande who brings his parish into a citizens' organization, to the New Orleans residents who get out the vote by taking a jazz band through streets devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Stout describes how these ordinary people conceive of citizenship, how they acquire and exercise power, and how religious ideas and institutions contribute to their successes.The most important book on organizing and grassroots democracy in a generation, Blessed Are the Organized is a passionate and hopeful account of how our endangered democratic principles can be put into action.
Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas
Ronald Wright - 1992
This incisive single-volume report tells the stories of the conquest and survival of five great American cultures — Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois. Through their eloquent words, we relive their strange, tragic experiences — including, in a new epilogue, incidents that bring us up to the twenty-first century.
Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies
Elaine G. Breslaw - 1995
The uniquely multicultural nature of life on a seventeenth-century Barbadan sugar plantation--defined by a mixture of English, American Indian, and African ways and folklore--indelibly shaped the young Tituba's world and the mental images she brought with her to Massachusetts.Breslaw divides Tituba's story into two parts. The first focuses on Tituba's roots in Barbados, the second on her life in the New World. The author emphasizes the inextricably linked worlds of the Caribbean and the North American colonies, illustrating how the Puritan worldview was influenced by its perception of possessed Indians. Breslaw argues that Tituba's confession to practicing witchcraft clearly reveals her savvy and determined efforts to protect herself by actively manipulating Puritan fears. This confession, perceived as evidence of a diabolical conspiracy, was the central agent in the cataclysmic series of events that saw 19 people executed and over 150 imprisoned, including a young girl of 5.A landmark contribution to women's history and early American history, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem sheds new light on one of the most painful episodes in American history, through the eyes of its most crucial participant.
Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul
Kenneth R. Miller - 2008
A highly regarded scientist’s examination of the battle between evolution and intelligent design, and its implications for how science is practiced in America.
Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America
Michael A. McDonnell - 2015
McDonnell reveals the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across Lakes Michigan and Huron, were equally influential. Masters of Empire charts the story of one group, the Odawa, who settled at the straits between those two lakes, a hub for trade and diplomacy throughout the vast country west of Montreal known as the pays d’en haut.Highlighting the long-standing rivalries and relationships among the great Indian nations of North America, McDonnell shows how Europeans often played only a minor role in this history, and reminds us that it was native peoples who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of commerce and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. As empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial part in the making of early America.Through vivid depictions—all from a native perspective—of early skirmishes, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution, Masters of Empire overturns our assumptions about colonial America. By calling attention to the Great Lakes as a crucible of culture and conflict, McDonnell reimagines the landscape of American history.
The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic
Melanie McGrath - 2007
"Nanook of the North" featured a mythical Eskimo hunter who lived in an igloo with his family in a frozen Eden. Nanook's story captured the world's imagination. Thirty years later, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit from the east coast of Hudson Bay to a region of the high artic that was 1,200 miles farther north. Hailing from a land rich in caribou and arctic foxes, whales and seals, pink saxifrage and heather, the Inuit's destination was Ellesmere Island, an arid and desolate landscape of shale and ice virtually devoid of life. The most northerly landmass on the planet, Ellesmere is blanketed in darkness for four months of the year. There the exiles were left to live on their own with little government support and few provisions. Among this group was Josephie Flaherty, the unrecognized, half-Inuit son of Robert Flaherty, who never met his father. In a narrative rich with human drama and heartbreak, Melanie McGrath uses the story of three generations of the Flaherty family--the filmmaker; his illegitimate son, Josephie; and Josephie's daughters, Mary and Martha--to bring this extraordinary tale of mistreatment and deprivation to life.
Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness
Shawn Micallef - 2017
It began as a series of reports from the civic drama of the 2014 elections. But beyond the municipal circus, writer and commentator Shawn Micallef discovered the much bigger story of a city emerging into greatness. He walked and talked with candidates from all over Greater Toronto, and observed how they energized their communities, never shying away from the problems that exist within them -- poverty, violence, racism, and drugs -- but advocating solutions that bring people together. Shawn Micallef introduces us to those fighting for a more inclusive vision of Toronto and reveals the promise and potential for a city that has been suffering through a severe identity crisis but is now on a steep upturn. Toronto, he says, is set fair to be a new urban model for cities all over the world. Micallef reveals Toronto in all its rich variety. It is hard, he says, to grasp the vast size and scope of Toronto until you spend a few hours walking through unfamiliar neighbourhoods. Each reveals another adjacent to it, and then another, and another. The city goes on and on, into unheralded ravines and oblique views of the downtown skyline. Hiding in all that geography is not only great beauty, but a force for change that's been building for decades as people arrived here from every corner of the globe. Frontier City is a revelatory view of the Toronto of today and an inspiring vision of the Toronto of the near future.From the Hardcover edition.
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City
Tanya Talaga - 2017
An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. None of those recommendations were applied.More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Jordan Wabasse, a gentle boy and star hockey player, disappeared into the minus twenty degrees Celsius night. The body of celebrated artist Norval Morrisseau’s grandson, Kyle, was pulled from a river, as was Curran Strang’s. Robyn Harper died in her boarding-house hallway and Paul Panacheese inexplicably collapsed on his kitchen floor. Reggie Bushie’s death finally prompted an inquest, seven years after the discovery of Jethro Anderson, the first boy whose body was found in the water.Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.
Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them
Shakil Choudhury - 2015
them” is an unfortunate but normal part of the human experience due to reasons of both nature and nurture.To really work through issues of racial difference and foster greater levels of fairness and inclusion, argues Shakil Choudhury, requires an understanding of the human mind—its conscious and unconscious dimensions. Deep Diversity integrates Choudhury’s twenty years of experience with interviews with researchers in social neuroscience, implicit bias, psychology, and mindfulness. Using a compassionate but challenging approach, Choudhury helps readers identify their own bias and offers practical ways to break the “prejudice habits” we have all learned, in order to tackle systemic discrimination.
War and Peace in the Global Village
Marshall McLuhan - 1968
A mosaic of pointed insights and probes, this text predicts a world without centres or boundaries. It illustrates how the electronic information travelling around the globe at the speed of light has eroded the rules of the linnear, literate world. No longer can there be fixed positions or goals.
The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground
Jeffrey Ostler - 2010
Their homeland was in the magnificent Black Hills in South Dakota, where they found plentiful game and held religious ceremonies at charged locations like Devil's Tower. Bullied by settlers and the U. S. Army, they refused to relinquish the land without a fight, most famously bringing down Custer at Little Bighorn. In 1873, though, on the brink of starvation, the Lakotas surrendered the Hills. But the story does not end there. Over the next hundred years, the Lakotas waged a remarkable campaign to recover the Black Hills, this time using the weapons of the law. In "The Lakotas and the Black Hills," the latest addition to the Penguin Library of American Indian History, Jeffrey Ostler moves with ease from battlefields to reservations to the Supreme Court, capturing the enduring spiritual strength that bore the Lakotas through the worst times and kept alive the dream of reclaiming their cherished homeland.
Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation
Jim Downs - 2016
According to conventional wisdom, gay liberation started with the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969. The 1970s represented a moment of triumph -- both political and sexual -- before the AIDS crisis in the subsequent decade, which, in the view of many, exposed the problems inherent in the so-called "gay lifestyle". In Stand by Me, the acclaimed historian Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together -- as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues -- to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life. As Downs shows, gay people found one another in the Metropolitan Community Church, a nationwide gay religious group; in the pages of the Body Politic, a newspaper that encouraged its readers to think of their sexuality as a political identity; at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, the hub of gay literary life in New York City; and at theaters putting on "Gay American History," a play that brought to the surface the enduring problem of gay oppression. These and many other achievements would be largely forgotten after the arrival in the early 1980s of HIV/AIDS, which allowed critics to claim that sex was the defining feature of gay liberation. This reductive narrative set back the cause of gay rights and has shaped the identities of gay people for decades. An essential act of historical recovery, Stand by Me shines a bright light on a triumphant moment, and will transform how we think about gay life in America from the 1970s into the present day.