Bury the Chains


Adam Hochschild - 2005
    In early 1787, twelve men - a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery - came together in a London printing shop and began the world's first grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent. Masterfully stoking public opinion, the movement's leaders pioneered a variety of techniques that have been adopted by citizens' movements ever since, from consumer boycotts to wall posters and lapel buttons to celebrity endorsements. A deft chronicle of this groundbreaking antislavery crusade and its powerful enemies, Bury the Chains gives a little-celebrated human rights watershed its due at last.

Rebels, Volume 1: A Well-Regulated Militia


Brian Wood - 2015
    With the War for Independence playing out across the colonies, young Seth and Mercy Abbott find their new marriage tested at every turn as the demands of the frontlines and the home front collide. Not merely rehashing the tales of the most famous men of the time, Rebels details the epic story of the colonists, explorers and traders, wives and daughters, farmers and volunteer soldiers who, in a few short, turbulent years, created the brand-new nation of America. With the American Revolution in the national zeitgeist, creators Brian Wood ("The Massive, DMZ, Northlanders") and Andrea Mutti ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Avengers") deliver a gripping piece of historical fiction with Rebels. Praise for the series: Thrilling . A comic with heart. --"COMIC BEAT" Rebels is a great & beautiful book! Read issue 1 & can't wait for the next one! "Matt Kindt, MIND MGMT" A fresh take on a familiar historical era. -- "LOS ANGELES TIMES/ HERO COMPLEX" The New World comes to life in a way you ve never see in it before. A comic. --"MAN CAVE DAILY" Like nothing you read in your school textbooks. --"NEWSARAMA" Rebels is a rare treat in the world of comic books today . The book offers a great start to a more intimate story of our country s founding, and is something that speaks a lot of truths about the state of our nation then and now. --"THE NERDIST" In Rebels, Wood focuses on the politics behind the war and the roiling discontent of the British colonists that eventually boiled over into eight years of bloody conflict . [Wood and c-creator Mutti] have produced a historical drama that s straightforward and easy to follow, but that doesn t shy away from exploring stickier issues like class divides, the role of women in the colonies, and the complex distinction between friend and foe. -"-VULTURE" Poignant and so incredibly powerful. --"POPMATTERS" One of Wood's biggest strengths is creating rich, believable characters with clear voices and "Rebels" is no different . Andrea Mutti delivers fast-paced action and panels full of emoting, active characters with spot-on design work Though it's set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, Wood and Mutti's "Rebels" is about basic human rights and the freedom to grow into a person or a country on one's own time. --"COMIC BOOK RESOURCES" An epic historical fiction that embodies the spirit of the American revolution like no other comic, has before. Wood has a proven track record for telling pulse pounding emotional stories. --"BLOODY DISGUSTING" You'll definitely want to check out [Wood s] latest creator-owned series. Rebels focuses on the many sides of the Revolutionary War conflict. [and] given Wood's track record with historical and politically-charged comics, we're expecting another winner. --"IGN" The art really steals the show in Rebels. Andrea Mutti s attention to detail and character design perfectly captured the 1770 s and the colonies. He was able to display his diverse talent by drawing serene forests of New Hampshire to the intense scenes of violence in the courthouse. Jordie Bellaire s colors are, naturally, beautiful and push the art to a different level. -"COMICOSITY" Fascinating. -"COMICVINE" Rebels #1 is a historical comic telling a story much different than what most publishers are producing. It is an exciting look back at a different time and an overlooked chapter in the American Revolution. History buffs will enjoy the story with its references to the overall big picture of the revolution. But the humanity of Seth Abbott and his family and friends give the story significance in how it affects everyday life. --"EXAMINER" The detailed and historically accurate artwork of Andrea Mutti (with the reliably rich coloring work from Jordie Bellaire) that really brings this to life. --"MENTAL FLOSS" Captivating. --"UNLEASH THE FANBOY" Excellent. -"FLICKERING MYTH" Andrea Mutti does a fantastic job of showcasing how bristly, dirty and violent fighting for freedom can be. -"BLOODY DISGUSTING " Very highly recommended. -"Si Spurrier" Brian Wood may be the best history teacher you never had. --"PASTE MAGAZINE" Absolutely entertaining, and thought-provoking. In today s world where we're still debating liberty and tyranny, Rebels is yet another timely relevant comic, much like . Demo, Channel Zero, Mara, The New York Four, DMZ, and more. --"GRAPHIC POLICY " "A welcome breath of fresh air. Rebels #1 is that rare comic book that makes historical fiction come alive. --"FREAK SUGAR" Engrossing, enlightening and entertaining. --TECH TIMES I m looking forward to it. --FANBOY COMICS A masterful recreation of America in the 18th century. Mutti has beautifully constructed historical Vermont with verdant forests, large farms, and serene towns that capture the ruralness of American culture at the time. His careful attention to clothing and weaponry shows an understanding of the era while Jordie Bellaire s (Everything) coloring brings the rustic feel of the century to life. . Even without Wood s dialogue the art is able to take readers back in time and give them a sense of the political tensions of the period. --GEEK CHIC LITE An action packed and dynamic first issue that sucks you in and doesn t let go. If this issue is any indicator then Rebels is going to be a very special and memorable series. --GEEKED OUT NATION"

Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire


Andrea Stuart - 2012
    He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas.As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fueling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade--“white gold,” as it was known--had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents.Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family--its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin--she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White


Henry Wiencek - 1999
    With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.The black family's story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves—who took their rightful place in mainstream America.In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family—once one of the wealthiest in America—to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family's fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history—the history of slavery's curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons' stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching.Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation's attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.

American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy


C. David Heymann - 2007
    Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy, the bestselling author of RFK brings to light new evidence that reveals, as never before, the contrasting lives of the children of Camelot. of b & w photos.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism


Harsha Walia - 2021
    Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, ruling class, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world.Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial exclusion. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and far-right nationalism is escalating deadly violence in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.

Cloud 9


Caryl Churchill - 1979
    The same family appears in Act Two 25 years older and back in London, only now it’s 1979. Cloud 9 is about relationships between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979 and has since been staged all over the world.

The Usurper King: The Fall of Richard II and the Rise of Henry of Bolingbroke, 1366-99


Marie Louise Bruce - 1986
    

American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings


Zitkála-Šá - 2003
    Raised on a Sioux reservation, she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today.

The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire


John Newsinger - 2006
    But what about Britain's role in the world? A People's History of the British Empire challenges the claim that the British Empire was a kinder, gentler empire and suggests that the description of 'Rogue State' is more fitting. How many people today know about Britain's deep involvement in the opium drug trade in China, or that Tony Blair's hero Gladstone devoted his maiden parliamentary speech to defending his family's slave plantation in Jamaica?John Newsinger has written a wonderful popular history of key episodes in British imperial history. He pays particular attention to the battles of the colonised to free themselves of its baleful rule, including Rebellion in Jamaica; The Irish Famine; The Opium Wars; The Great Indian Rebellion; The Conquest of Egypt; Palestine in Revolt; 'Quit India' and the struggle for Independence; Suez; Malaya; Kenya and Rhodesia; and, Britain and American Imperialism.

When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846


Ramón A. Gutiérrez - 1991
    This social history of one remote corner of Spain's colonial American empire uses marriage as a window into intimate social relations, examining the Spanish conquest of America and its impact on a group of indigenous peoples, the Pueblo Indians, seen in large part from their point of view.

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities


Craig Steven Wilder - 2013
    But Brown's troubling past was far from unique. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy.Many of America's revered colleges and universities—from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC—were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.

Accardo: The Genuine Godfather


William F. Roemer Jr. - 1995
    . . Roemer [is] America's most decorated FBI agent."--Chicago TribuneFor forty years Tony Accardo was America's most dangerous criminal. He cut his teeth on the Chicago mob wars of Capone and Elliot Ness. He got his nickname "Joe Batters" for killing two men with a baseball bat. As the bodies piled up, Capone's youngest capo murdered and schemed his way to the top.William Roemer was the first FBI agent to face Tony "The Big Tuna" Accardo. Now, Roemer tells the story that only he could tell: the deals, the hits, the double-crosses, and the power plays that reached from the Windy City to Hollywood and to New York. Drawing on secret wiretaps and inside information, ACCARDO chronicles bloodshed and mayhem for more than six decades--as Roemer duels against the most powerful don of them all. . . ."Roemer brings the reality of organized crime home to us."--Boston Herald"A big, sprawled out account that serves as anecdotal history of organized crime."--Kirkus Reviews

Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War


Melvin Patrick Ely - 2004
    His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife. Slavery cast its grim shadow, even over the lives of the free, yet on Israel Hill we discover a moving story of hardship and hope that defies our expectations of the Old South.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People


Debbie Reese - 2019
    Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples' resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism.Going beyond the story of America as a country "discovered" by a few brave men in the "New World," Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.