Davis depicts the various ways different societies have responded to the intrinsic contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770's in order to establish the uniqueness of the abolitionists' response. While slavery has always caused considerable social and psychological tension, Western culture has associated it with certain religious and philosophical doctrines that gave it the highest sanction. The contradiction of slavery grew more profound when it became closely linked with American colonization, which had as its basic foundation the desire and opportunity to create a more perfect society. Davis provides a comparative analysis of slave systems in the Old World, a discussion of the early attitudes towards American slavery, and a detailed exploration of the early protests against Negro bondage, as well as the religious, literary, and philosophical developments that contributed to both sides in the controversies of the late eighteenth century. This exemplary introduction to the history of slavery in Western culture presents the traditions in thought and value that gave rise to the attitudes of both abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth century.

    It contains the most extensive collection of Benjamin Franklin's autobiographical writings, much of which was long out-of-print. Also included are some fifty letters written by Franklin that were never published before.

    On a February evening in 2012, in a small town in central Florida, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home with candy and a can of juice in hand and talking on the phone with a friend when a fatal encounter with a gun-wielding neighborhood watchman ended his young life. The watchman was briefly detained by the police and released. Trayvon's father, a truck driver named Tracy, tried to get answers from the police but was shut down and ignored. Trayvon's mother, a civil servant for the city of Miami, was paralyzed by the news of her son's death and lost in mourning, unable to leave her room for days. But in a matter of weeks, their son's name would be spoken by President Obama, honored by professional athletes, and passionately discussed all over traditional and social media. And at the head of a growing nationwide campaign for justice were Trayvon's parents, who driven by their intense love for their lost son discovered their voices, gathered allies, and launched a movement that would change the country. Five years after his tragic death, Travyon Martin's name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one black child s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade? Rest in Power, told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers, for the first time, those questions from the most intimate of sources. It s the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning. Advance praise for Rest in Power"Not since Emmitt Till has a parent's love for a murdered child moved the nation to search its soul about racial injustice and inequality. Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin's extraordinary witness, indomitable spirit and unwavering demand for change have altered the dynamics of racial justice discourse in this country. This powerful book illuminates the witness, the grief, and the commitment to reform that Trayvon Martin's death has mobilized; it is a story fueled by a demand for justice but rooted in love." -- Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy "As the fifth anniversary of this tragic crime nears, Fulton and Martin share a remarkably candid and deeply affecting in-the-moment chronicle of the explosive aftermath of the murder. Writing in alternate chapters, they share every detail of their shock, grief, and grueling quest for justice. . . . Given the unconscionable shooting deaths of young black men, many by police, that followed Trayvon's, this galvanizing testimony from parents who channeled their sorrow into action offers a deeply humanizing perspective on the crisis propelling a national movement." --Booklist (starred review)

    King’s Promised Land. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech, equality is the law of the land, but actual integration is still hard to find. Mammoth battles over forced busing, unfair housing practices, and affirmative action have hardly helped. The bleak fact is that black people and white people in the United States don’t spend much time together—at work, school, church, or anywhere. Tanner Colby, himself a child of a white-flight Southern suburb, set out to discover why.Some of My Best Friends Are Black chronicles America’s troubling relationship with race through four interrelated stories: the transformation of a once-racist Birmingham school system; a Kansas City neighborhood’s fight against housing discrimination; the curious racial divide of the Madison Avenue ad world; and a Louisiana Catholic parish’s forty-year effort to build an integrated church. Writing with a reporter’s nose and a stylist’s flair, Colby uncovers the deep emotional fault lines set trembling by race and takes an unflinching look at an America still struggling to reach the mountaintop.

    She's a sharp and funny speaker who is much in demand.

    Critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. As James Forman, Jr., points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand why.Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black officials, including Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and federal prosecutor Eric Holder, feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness—and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.A former D.C. public defender, Forman tells riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants, and crime victims. He writes with compassion about individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas—from the men and women he represented in court to officials struggling to respond to a public safety emergency. Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.

    Leigh Stansfield, a young English lad, is drawn into the thickest of the conflict. Forming a company of boys as scouts for the Venddan Army, he greatly aids the peasants. He rescues his sister from the guillotine, and finally, after many thrilling experiences, when the cause of La Vendde is lost, he escapes to England.

    Robert Reed Church, became the largest landowner in Tennessee. Hannah Elias, the mistress of a New York City millionaire, used the land her lover gave her to build an empire in Harlem. Orphan and self-taught chemist Annie Turnbo-Malone, developed the first national brand of hair care products. Mississippi school teacher O. W. Gurley, developed a piece of Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a “town” for wealthy black professionals and craftsmen that would become known as “the Black Wall Street.” Although Madam C. J Walker was given the title of America’s first female black millionaire, she was not. She was the first, however, to flaunt and openly claim her wealth—a dangerous and revolutionary act.Nearly all the unforgettable personalities in this amazing collection were often attacked, demonized, or swindled out of their wealth. Black Fortunes illuminates as never before the birth of the black business titan.

    And all her spells ever brought was trouble. Since her death, with no power of my own, I’ve stayed far, far away from magic . . . In a San Francisco struggling to recover from earthquakes and rising seas, and where technology can do things that are close enough to magic anyway, Maggie Lachlan is a computer whisperer. The one they call when no one else can find the elusive bug bringing a complex system to its knees. They call her the Techwitch. But she knows there’s nothing magical about what she does. It’s just hard-earned skill. So when Damon Riley, owner of the world’s biggest virtual reality gaming company comes calling with a problem that his entire empire of geeks can’t fix, Maggie leaps at the job. Riley Arts is the kind of place she feels at home. Wall-to-wall tech. No magic. Except, perhaps, for the unsettling chemistry she has with the man in charge. But she never imagined stepping into one of Damon’s games would reveal her mother lied about Maggie’s magic. Or that technology could break a spell she never knew she was under. Now she has a demon hunting her and a whole world she knows nothing about to navigate. To save herself—and the world—she needs to learn fast. Because, when it comes to magic, too many games are wicked. And if you lose, the price can be very, very high . . . The intriguing start to a new dark and sexy Urban Fantasy series from M.J. Scott, RITA® Award nominated author of The Four Arts series and the Half-Light City series. The TechWitch series Book 1 - Wicked Games What people are saying about M.J. Scott “Exciting and rife with political intrigue and magic…” RT Book Reviews “everything I love about Urban Fantasies, kick butt action, fantastic characters, romance that makes the heart beat fast…” Seeing Night Reviews “Scott’s writing is rather superb” Bookworm Blues “Strong and complex world building, emotionally layered relationships, and enough action to keep me up long past my bedtime.” Vampire Book Club “The story’s real strength lies in the web of intrigue Scott creates around her characters.” Publisher’s Weekly

    Kennan. On his graduation from Princeton in 1925, moved perhaps by the example of his distant cousin George Kennan, who wrote the classic work on Siberia, the younger George prepared to enter the Foreign Service. After a short exposure to diplomacy in Germany and on the Baltic Coast, the young consul felt so inadequate that he was about to resign. His career was salvaged when the State Department registered him as a student of Russian at the University of Berlin, and here he began to acquire his knowledge of and insight into the Russian character which were to serve him so well.It has been Mr. Kennan's destiny to be posted repeatedly at the threshold of crises. His fluency in Russian make him an indispensable member of Ambassador Bullitt's small staff which reopened the American Embassy in Moscow in 1933. He was an observer at Stalin's famous purge trials. He was in Prague when the Germans took over Czechoslovakia. When Hitler declared war on the United States, Mr. Kennan was in Berlin and was interned for six months. He was Harriman's right-hand man in Moscow from 1944 to 1946 during the strenuous war negotiations with the Kremlin. Throughout this long exposure to the agony of Europe, Mr. Kennan was evolving policies for dealing with the Russians and, after the end of the war, the Germans. His Russian policies he defined in a series of farsighted Position Papers, which were sent to the State Department and pigeonholed without comment. These historic papers have been released by the State Department and are published at the end of this volume.When he was recalled to Washington in 1946, Kennan came into his own as a positive force in American foreign policy. President Truman and Secretary Marshall gave him the scope which F.D.R. had denied him. Kennan played a formative part in the development and application of the Marshall Plan. He was sent to Japan to help reform our occupational policy. He drew up a blueprint for the peaceful settlement of Central Europe -- a settlement in which he strongly resisted the rearming of Germany with nuclear weapons.This long and detailed account of twenty-five years of diplomatic history is written with extraordinary eloquence and lucidity. Mr. Kennan's portraits of Stalin, William Bullitt, Alexander Kirk, Harry Hopkins, General Marshall, Ambassador Harriman and Charles Bohlen are superbly drawn. The generous excerpts from his journals reveal his sensitivity to human details and his skill at evoking scenes and incidents from his travels in many lands.Mr. Kennan never loses the overview. Transcending he personal encounters, the specific events and positions, are his clearly articulated principles for the just government of foreign affairs in a world for which, like it or not, we as Americans bear a major responsibility. This makes these memoirs the most important book Mr. Kennan has yet written.

    Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

    Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of "white guilt" and neither has been good for African Americans.Through articulate analysis and engrossing recollections, acclaimed race relations scholar Shelby Steele sounds a powerful call for a new culture of personal responsibility.

    No matter how gruesome the memories are, relatively few of the interviewees said they would have been better off without the experience. It was a central and formative experience in their lives. Although 400,000 Americans perished, the United States itself was not attacked again after Pearl Harbor, the economy grew, and there was a new sense of world power that invigorated the country. Some women and African Americans experienced new freedoms in the post war society, but good life after World War II was tarnished by the threat of nuclear war.

    Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama's presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.In the story of Baldwin's crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography--drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews--with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude's endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.