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...

The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for AmericaThe Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke ou...

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...

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger—torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mot...

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...

A distinctive portrait of the Fab Four by one of the sharpest and wittiest writers of our time."If you want to know what it was like to live those extraordinary Beatles years in real time, read this book." —Alan Johnson, The SpectatorThough fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the fab four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture. Their influence extends far beyond music and into realms as ...