The just-discovered story of how two enigmatic circus performers and the cultural ferment of the Gilded Age sparked the Black Muslim movement in AmericaDelving into new archives and uncovering fascinating biographical narratives, secret rituals, and hidden identities, historian Jacob Dorman explains why thousands of Americans were enthralled by the Islamic Orient, and why some came to see Islam as a global antiracist movement uniquely suited to people of African de...

The just-discovered story of how two enigmatic circus performers and the cultural ferment of the Gilded Age sparked the Black Muslim movement in AmericaDelving into new archives and uncovering fascinating biographical narratives, secret rituals, and hidden identities, historian Jacob Dorman explains why thousands of Americans were enthralled by the Islamic Orient, and why some came to see Islam as a global antiracist movement uniquely suited to people of African de...

**"**The work is clear-eyed but naturally imbued with a granddaughter's affection. Narrator Bernadette Dunne's amiable manner is a good match for the author's tone, objective but tinged with warmth...Dunne manages to go beyond the plain sense of the text to give us the author as an intelligent, sensible, well-spoken person who is examining an important life in a way that informs, pleases, and serves as a lesson for the present day." -- AudioFile MagazineThis progra...

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., the prophet for racial and economic justice in America, was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. Only hours earlier, he had ended his final public speech with the words, "I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land." In this impactful book, acclaimed public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson offers a comprehensive reevaluation of the fate of America, specifi...

In the last days of World War II, a new and baffling weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. To the sailors who learned to fear them, the body-crashing warriors of Japan were known as "suiciders"; among the Japanese, they were named for a divine wind that once saved the home islands from invasion: kamikaze.Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detai...

In the early 20th century, most African Americans still lived in the South, disenfranchised, impoverished, terrorized by white violence, and denied the basic rights of citizenship. As the Democrats swept into the White House on a wave of black defectors from the Party of Lincoln, a group of African American intellectuals―legal minds, social scientists, media folk―sought to get the community’s needs on the table. This would become the Black Cabinet, a group of African American racial affair...

An extraordinary American comes to life in this vivid, incisive portrait of the early days of the republic—and the birth of modern politics hen the roar of the Revolution had finally died down, a new generation of American politicians was summoned to the Potomac to assemble the nation's newly minted capital. Into that unsteady atmosphere which would soon enough erupt into another conflict with Britain in 1812, Dolley Madison arrived, alongside her husband James. Within a few years, she had...

In this moving account, Peter Korn explores the nature and rewards of creative practice. We follow his search for meaning as an Ivy-educated child of the middle class who finds employment as a novice carpenter on Nantucket, transitions to self-employment as a designer and maker of fine furniture, takes a turn at teaching and administration at Colorado's Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and then founds a school in Maine: the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, an internationally respected nonpro...

Between 1539 and 1542, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led a small army on an expedition of almost four thousand miles across Southeastern America. De Soto's path had been one of history's most intriguing mysteries until the publication of Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun. Using a new route reconstruction, anthropologist Charles Hudson maps the story of the de Soto expedition, tying the route to a number of specific archaeological sites.De Soto's journey cut a b...

Examining a series of El Niño–induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the nineteenth century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global...

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation, the story of a woman's experiences of war and an unusual friendship'Resonant and provocative' VOGUE'One of my favourite authors' NATALIE PORTMANI did not remember a Rouenna Zycinski. I was sure I had never known her. But many years ago, according to her letter, we had been neighbor...

The epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America. Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900. Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its commu...