In 1957, the eyes of the world turned to a single high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine young Black students walked through a gauntlet of hatred, National Guard bayonets, and screaming mobs to claim their constitutional right to an education. At the center of that storm stood Daisy Bates, journalist, activist, and fearless strategist, whose home became a command post, a sanctuary, and a target. In this searing memoir, she tells the full story of what it cost to fight for justice...

In "The Passing of the Aborigines," Daisy Bates presents a compelling ethnographic exploration of Aboriginal Australian culture during the early 20th century. The book is a tapestry woven from Bates' extensive fieldwork, personal observations, and interviews, offering a vivid narrative that brings to life the customs, challenges, and resilience of Indigenous communities. Her literary style is both descriptive and reflective, capturing the nuances of Aboriginal traditions while grappling wi...

DAISY BATES: "As the years passed, I was more and more convinced that it was impossibleto leave these people, to be deaf to their appeal for human kindliness,and of the hopelessness of any movement except one of help and comfort tothe individual, and personal example. So savage and so simple, so muchastray and so utterly helpless were they, that somehow they became myresponsibility. All along the thousand miles of railway, there was noother...

In "The Passing of the Aborigines," Daisy Bates presents a poignant and often painful chronicle of Indigenous Australian life in the early 20th century. Blending autobiographical elements with ethnographic observations, Bates captures the complexities of Aboriginal culture, spirituality, and the drastic changes imposed by colonial encroachment. Her prose is both lyrical and incisive, marked by a deep empathy for her subjects, while also reflecting the conflicts of her time, illustrating th...

The Passing of the Aborigines is a hybrid work of memoir, travel narrative, and colonial ethnography, presenting Daisy Bates's decades of observations among Aboriginal communities in Western and South Australia. Written in a vivid, anecdotal style shaped by journalism and imperial-era anthropology, the book records customs, kinship practices, ceremonies, languages, and daily life, while also advancing the now deeply problematic "doomed race" thesis common in early twentieth-century settler...

The Passing of the Aborigines gathers Bates's newspaper pieces into a chronicle of Aboriginal life and colonial rupture across remote Australia. Mixing anecdotal reportage with ethnographic notes, it describes ceremonies, kinship, languages, illness, hunger, and policing. The Edwardian, rhetorical style and serialized, episodic form—shaped in part by Ernestine Hill—mark an interwar "salvage" anthropology that marries meticulous observation to an extinctionist, paternalist frame. Irish-born...

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book AwardThough not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mc...

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her “the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time.” Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn’t be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National...

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her "the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time." Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn't be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National...

An irreverent look at Presidential foibles, follies, fibs, and moral failuresWere past presidents smarter, more honest, and better behaved that those we elect today? Don’t bet on it! White House Confidential shows that commanders-in-chief have been lying, cheating, stealing, and womanizing from the days of the Founding Fathers. Focusing on the qualities that never made it into White House press releases, the authors look at their sexual misdeeds and strang...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America.“Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize • Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award • O...

The complete rankings of our best -- and worst -- presidents, based on C-SPAN's much-cited Historians Surveys of Presidential Leadership.Over a period of decades, C-SPAN has surveyed leading historians on the best and worst of America's presidents across a variety of categories -- their ability to persuade the public, their leadership skills, their moral authority, and more. The crucible of the presidency has forged some of the very best and very worst leaders in o...