Butterfield follows the Bosket family of Edgefield County, South Carolina, from the days of slavery to the present. Photos.

    He describes in very human terms 475 years of recorded history in the Palmetto State, including the experiences of all South Carolinians--those with roots in Africa and in Europe as well as Native Americans; male and female; rich and poor. In an eminently readable presentation, Edgar uses letters, diaries, and other writings to let voices from the past take part in telling the state's fascinating story.Recounting the period from the first Spanish exploration to the end of the Civil War, Edgar charts South Carolina's rising national and international prominence and its parallel economic ascendancy. He dispels myths about the state's early history--including the notion that the colony was inhabited by a homogeneous white population--and tells how South Carolina developed an agricultural economy that relied heavily on African American slave labor. Edgar examines, among other topics, the impact of the American revolution, Charleston's significance as a metropolis and major seaport, and the state's leadership in the Secession movement.With changes wrought by the Civil War, South Carolina slipped from national prominence into a period marked by economic, social, civil, and political strife. Edgar details the everyday life of blacks and whites during Reconstruction, the state's mixed efforts to join the New South, and Benjamin Ryan Tillman's rise to power. He also chronicles South Carolina's changing politics in the once-solid South, the state's reawakening after World War II, the casualties and victories of an extended civil rights struggle, and the Palmetto State's present economic, educational, and political challenges.

    Board of Education decision when one Virginia school system refused to integrate.In the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision, Virginia’s Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. The community’s white leaders quickly established a private academy, commandeering supplies from the shuttered public schools to use in their all-white classrooms. Meanwhile, black parents had few options: keep their kids at home, move across county lines, or send them to live with relatives in other states. For five years, the schools remained closed.Kristen Green, a longtime newspaper reporter, grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which did not admit black students until 1986. In her journey to uncover what happened in her hometown before she was born, Green tells the stories of families divided by the school closures and of 1,700 black children denied an education. As she peels back the layers of this haunting period in our nation’s past, her own family’s role—no less complex and painful—comes to light.At once gripping, enlightening, and deeply moving, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a dramatic chronicle that explores our troubled racial past and its reverberations today, and a timeless story about compassion, forgiveness, and the meaning of home.

    For the series and the book, The History Channel challenged a panel of leading historians, including author Steven M. Gillon, to come up with some less well-known but historically significant events that triggered change in America. Together, the days they chose tell a story about the great democratic ideals upon which our country was built. You won’t find July 4, 1776, for instance, or the attack on Fort Sumter that ignited the Civil War, or the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. But January 25, 1787, is here. On that day, the ragtag men of Shays’ Rebellion attacked the federal arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, and set the new nation on the path to a strong central government. January 24, 1848, is also on the list. That’s when a carpenter named John Marshall spotted a few glittering flakes of gold in a California riverbed. The discovery profoundly altered the American dream. Here, too, is the day that noted pacifist Albert Einstein unwittingly advocated the creation of the Manhattan Project, thus setting in motion a terrible chain of events. Re-creating each event with vivid immediacy, accessibility, and historical accuracy, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America comes together as a history of our country, from the first colonists’ contact with Native Americans to the 1960s. It is a snapshot of our country as we were, are, and will be.

    Heffner and journalist Alexander Heffner, this book includes important documents such as:* The complete text of the Declaration of Independence* The complete Constitution of the United States* The Monroe Doctrine* The Emancipation Proclamation* Woodrow Wilson's War Message to Congress* Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" Speech* John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address* Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech* Ronald Reagan's Inaugural Addresses* Documents relating to September 11, 2001 and the Iraq WarThis edition has been expanded and updated to include a chapter on the Presidency of Donald Trump.

    The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people.

    That is, until she was unexpectedly diagnosed with an aggressive type of breast cancer at the age of 35. As she underwent more than a year of treatment, Pickert realized that the popular understanding of breast care in America bears little resemblance to the experiences of today's patients and the rapidly changing science designed to save their lives. After using her journalistic skills to navigate her own care, Pickert embarked on a quest to understand the cultural, scientific and historical forces shaping the lives of breast-cancer patients in the modern age.Breast cancer is one of history's most prolific killers. Despite billions spent on research and treatments, it remains one of the deadliest diseases facing women today. From the forests of the Pacific Northwest to an operating suite in Los Angeles to the epicenter of pink-ribbon advocacy in Dallas, Pickert reports on the turning points and people responsible for the progress that has been made against breast cancer and documents the challenges of defeating a disease that strikes one in eight American women and has helped shape the country's medical culture.Drawing on interviews with doctors, economists, researchers, advocates and patients, as well as on journal entries and recordings collected over the author's treatment, Radical puts the story of breast cancer into context, and shows how modern treatments represent a long overdue shift in the way doctors approach cancer -- and disease -- itself.

    Goliath tale with a twist.” —The New York Times Book Review The story that inspired the major motion picture Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott.In 1998, Rob Bilott began a legal battle against DuPont that would consume the next twenty years of his life, uncovering the worst case of environmental contamination in modern history and a corporate cover-up that put the health of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. Representing a single farmer who was convinced the creek on his property had been poisoned by runoff from a nearby DuPont landfill, Rob ultimately discovers the truth about PFAS—unregulated, toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing of Teflon and a host of other household goods. DuPont’s own scientists had issued internal warnings for years about the harmful effects of PFAS on human health, but the company continued to allow these chemicals to leach into public drinking water. Until Rob forced them to face the consequences. Exposure is an unforgettable legal drama about malice and manipulation, the failings of environmental regulation, and one lawyer’s quest to expose the truth about this previously unknown—and still unregulated—chemical that presents one of the greatest human health crises of the 21st century.

    Illustrated with black-and-white archival engravings with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    In 1845, seven years after escaping to the North, he published Narrative, the first of three autobiographies. This book calmly but dramatically recounts the horrors and the accomplishments of his early years—the daily, casual brutality of the white masters; his painful efforts to educate himself; his decision to find freedom or die; and his harrowing but successful escape.An astonishing orator and a skillful writer, Douglass became a newspaper editor, a political activist, and an eloquent spokesperson for the civil rights of African Americans. He lived through the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the beginning of segregation. He was celebrated internationally as the leading black intellectual of his day, and his story still resonates in ours.

    An autobiography of a young Chinese man whose childhood and adolescence were spent in Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution.

    Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Buckley's National Review was at the center of conservative political analysis from the mid-fifties onward. But the policy intellectuals knew that to actually change the way the country was run, they needed a presidential candidate, and the man they turned to was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was in many ways the perfect choice: self-reliant, unpretentious, unshakably honest and dashingly handsome, with a devoted following that grew throughout the fifties and early sixties. He possessed deep integrity and a sense of decency that made him a natural spokesman for conservative ideals. But his flaws were a product of his virtues. He wouldn't bend his opinions to make himself more popular, he insisted on using his own inexperienced advisors to run his presidential campaign, and in the end he electrified a large portion of the electorate but lost the great majority. Flying High is Buckley's partly fictional tribute to the man who was in many ways his alter ego in the conservative movement. It is the story of two men who looked as if they were on the losing side of political events, but were kept aloft by the conviction that in fact they were making history.

    W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) played a key role in developing the strategy and program that dominated early 20th-century black protest in America. In this collection of essays, first published together in 1903, he eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. He also charges that the strategy of accommodation to white supremacy advanced by Booker T. Washington, then the most influential black leader in America, would only serve to perpetuate black oppression.Publication of The Souls of Black Folk was a dramatic event that helped to polarize black leaders into two groups: the more conservative followers of Washington and the more radical supporters of aggressive protest. Its influence cannot be overstated. It is essential reading for everyone interested in African-American history and the struggle for civil rights in America.

    Carter G. Woodson shows us the weakness of Euro-centric based curriculums that fail to include African American history and culture. This system mis-educates the African American student, failing to prepare them for success and to give them an adequate sense of who they are within the system that they must live. Woodson provides many strong solutions to the problems he identifies. A must-read for anyone working in the education field.

    Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?  Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.