Category: BOOKS

HOW THE WORLD IS GOVERNED

“NEITHER CURRENT EVENTS NOR HISTORY SHOW THAT THE MAJORITY RULE, OR EVER DID RULE”. Jefferson Davis

THE BOOK OF RULE

Provides a clear overview of every type of government.

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Profiles all 193 nations of the world, including each country’s political system, leaders, major political and world issues, internal oppositions, alliances, and trade agreements.

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Includes key information on global networks of power, current international law, world organizations, and much, much more.

(from the cover)

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zealot, Reza Aslan, explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine and sounds a call to embrace a deeper, more expansive understanding of God.

In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large.

In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as one long and remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.”

But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature — our compassion, our thirst for justice — but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments.

More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in ( one God, many gods, or no god at all,) God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives.

(from the book jacket)

The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. DuBois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.

As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation’s racial inequities in everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them — and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

(from the jacket cover)

The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and FIVE BLACK LIVES by Kenneth C. Davis

Did you know that many of America’s Founding Fathers — who fought for liberty and justice for all — were slave owners?

Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people “owned” by four of our greatest presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role that slavery played in the founding of America. From Billy Lee, valet to George Washington, to Alfred Jackson, faithful servant of Andrew Jackson, these dramatic narratives explore our country’s great tragedy — that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles.

These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but who have traditionally been left out of the history books. Their stories are true — and they should be heard.

(from the jacket)

HERE ARE THE STORIES OF FIVE ENSLAVED PEOPLE WHO WITNESSED THE BIRTH OF AMERICA:

• BILLY LEE, who became George Washington’s valet and fought in the American Revolution alongside him.
• ONA JUDGE, who escaped from Washington’s Philadelphia household — only to be hunted by the president’s men.
• ISAAC GRANGER, who survived the devastation of Yorktown before returning to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
• PAUL JENNINGS, who was present at the burning of James Madison’s White House during the War of 1812.
• ALFRED JACKSON, who was born into slavery at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation and lived into the twentieth century.

(from the back cover)

BLACK

AND

WHITE

THE WAY I SEE IT

By Richard Williams with Bart Davis

He’d set his mind to raise two of the greatest women champions in professional tennis well before they could even hold a racket. The father of Venus and Serena Williams had a grand plan for his daughters. The source of his vision, the method behind his execution, and the root of his indomitable spirit he held private. Until now. What he reveals about his success — his story of struggle, determination, hard work, and family — is told in the pages of this inspiring memoir, Black and White: The Way I See It.

Richard Williams, for the first time ever, shares stories about the poverty and violence of his early life in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1940’s — a life that could have ended on the day he was born because of indifference, racism, and cruelty were it not for the strength of his mother and the kindness of a stranger. Williams’s mother was his hero, just as he became a hero to Venus and Serena, who express in the book the lessons he taught them and how much they love their much-criticized and even maligned father. His critics claimed that he was “in the way” of his daughters’ athletic success, that he was “destroying his daughters’ marketing and advertising abilities,” and even accused him of “abuse.”

Richard Williams describes a family life held together by the principles that matter most: courage, confidence, commitment, faith, and above all, love.

“When you’re younger, as a female, you flock to your father. When you get older, you’re closer to your mother. I still feel really, really close to my father …. We have a great relationship. There is an appreciation. There is a closeness because of what we’ve been through together, and a respect,” says Serena.

“Training started early for my kids, but it wasn’t only on the tennis courts. I used to take Venus and Serena to work with me so they could learn the importance of planning, responsibility, and a strong work ethic, even at their early age,” Richard Williams writes. The self-made man saw the value of education and had the discipline to practice what he learned. He went so far as to write a plan for his family’s future before his tennis champion daughters were even born.

Richard Williams has walked a long, hard, exciting, and ultimately rewarding road for seventy years, fighting every hand raised against him while raising a loving family and two of the greatest tennis players who ever lived.

(from the book jacket)

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

(from the back cover)

by Howard Zinn

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History of the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of — and in the words of — America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

(from the cover)

The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

“The wretched and landless poor have been a part of American culture from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. In her ground-breaking history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg explodes our comforting myths about equality in the land of opportunity, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present poor white trash.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature, and scientific theories over four hundred years. Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society — where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Some of the founding fathers believed poor people were subhuman, and wanted to apply strategies used in agriculture and animal husbandry to improve the stock. Poor whites were central to the rise of Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in addition to slavery, the Civil War itself was fought over class issues. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which was a factor in the rise of eugenics — a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. Those poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society. Now they are offered to us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been near the center of major debates over the character of the American identity.

The contemporary focus on the “one percent” has animated public discussion about power dynamics, but without context. We have been taught to overlook the fact that privilege runs deep in our history. Without pause, America has been ignoring, if not hating, its underclass since the seventeenth century. Today we acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring nature of class as well.”

(From the flap of the book)

The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

“White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain’s American colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 people became slaves there in all but name. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.

Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule.

The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.

This saga of exploitation and cruelty, which spanned 170 years, has been submerged by the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.”

(From the back cover of the book)

The following is taken Verbatim from the Jacket of Andrew Levy’s book, “The First Emancipator”: The Forgotten Story of ROBERT CARTER the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves:

A GROUNDBREAKING WORK OF HISTORY THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND SLAVERY

Robert Carter III, the grandson of Tidewater legend Robert “King” Carter, was born into the highest circles of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy. He was neighbor and kin to the Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. But on September 5, 1791, Carter severed his ties with this glamorous elite at the stroke of a pen. In a document he called his Deed of Gift, Carter declared his intent to set free nearly five hundred slaves in the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation.

How did Carter succeed in the very action that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson claimed they fervently desired but were powerless to effect? And why has his name all but vanished from the annals of American history? In this haunting, brilliantly original work, Andrew Levy traces the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and passion that led to Carter’s extraordinary act.

At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, Carter was one of the wealthiest men in America, the owner of tens of thousands of acres of land, factories, iron works — and hundreds of slaves. But incrementally, almost unconsciously, Carter grew to feel that what he possessed was not truly his. In an era of empty Anglican piety, Carter experienced a feverish religious vision that impelled him to help build a church where blacks and whites were equals. In an age of publicly sanctioned sadism against blacks, he defied convention and extended new protections and privileges to his slaves. As the war ended and his fortunes declined, Carter dedicated himself even more fiercely to liberty, clashing repeatedly with his neighbors, his friends, government officials, and, most poignantly, his own family.

But Carter was not the only humane master, nor the sole partisan of freedom, in that freedom-loving age. Why did this troubled, spiritually torn man dare to do what far more visionary slave owners only dreamed of? In answering this question, Andrew Levy teases out the very texture of Carter’s life and soul — the unspoken passions that divided him from others of his class, and the religious conversion that enabled him to see his black slaves in a new light.

Drawing on years of painstaking research, written with grace and fire, The First Emancipator is a portrait of an unsung hero who has finally won his place in American history. It is an astonishing, challenging, and ultimately inspiring book.

(from the jacket)