Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South

This groundbreaking book collects black women’s personal recollections of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South. Using first-person narratives, collected through oral history interviews, the book emphasizes women’s role in their families and communities, treating women as important actors in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the segregated South. By focusing on the commonalities of women’s experiences, as well as the ways that women’s lives differed from the experiences of southern black men, Living with Jim Crow analyzes the interlocking forces of racism and sexism. [Description provided by the publisher] E185.61.V35

Making Failure Pay: For-Profit Tutoring, High-Stakes Testing, and Public Schools

A little-discussed aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that requires failing schools to hire after-school tutoring companies-the largest of which are private, for-profit corporations-and to pay them with federal funds. Making Failure Pay takes a hard look at the implications of this new blurring of the boundaries between government, schools, and commerce in New York City, the country's largest school district. As Jill P. Koyama explains in this revelatory book, NCLB-a federally legislated, state-regulated, district-administered, and school-applied policy-explicitly legitimizes giving private organizations significant roles in public education. Based on her three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Koyama finds that the results are political, problematic, and highly profitable. Bringing to light these unproven, unregulated private companies' almost invisible partnership with the government, Making Failure Pay lays bare the unintended consequences of federal efforts to eliminate school failure-not the least of which is more failure. [Description provided by the publisher] LB2822.82.K69

Hamas: A Beginner's Guide

This beginner's guide to Hamas has been fully revised and updated. It now covers all the major events since the January 2006 elections, including the conflict with Fatah and Israel's brutal offensive in Gaza at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009. Explaining the reasons for Hamas's popularity, leading expert and Cambridge academic Khaled Hroub provides the key facts that are so often missing from conventional news reports. This is a one-stop guide that gives a clear overview of Hamas's history, its beliefs and its political agenda. This unique book provides a refreshing perspective that gets to the heart of Hamas. [Description provided by the publisher] JQ1830.A98.H375

Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire

Drawing on the individual stories as well as authoritative research, Texas Tough reveals the true origins of America's prison juggernaut and points toward a more just and humane future. [Description provided by the publisher] HV9475.T4.P47

Burning Down My Masters' House: A Personal Descent Into Madness That Shook the New York Times

PN4874.B544.A3

Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy

Drawing on longitudinal interviews, government records, and personal narratives, feminist sociologist Lisa Brush examines the intersection of work, welfare, and battering. Brush contrasts conventional wisdom with illuminating analyses of social change and social structures, highlighting how race and class shape women's experiences with poverty and abuse and how "domestic" violence moves out of the home and follows women to work. [Description provided by the publisher] HV6626.2.B78

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. [Description provided by the publisher] PR9080.5.N59

A Companion to Greek Mythology

A Companion to Greek Mythology approaches the richly diverse phenomenon of Greek myth from a distinctive new angle -- one that delves deeply into its origins in shared Indo-European story patterns and the Greeks’ contacts with their Eastern Mediterranean neighbours. Contributions from a team of international experts trace the development of Greek myth into a shared language, heritage, and way of thinking throughout the entire Greco-Roman world. [Description provided by the publisher] Reference BL783.C66

Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites

Donald B. Kraybill has spent his career among Anabaptist groups, gaining an unparalleled understanding of these traditionally private people. Kraybill shares that deep knowledge in this succinct overview of the beliefs and cultural practices of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites in North America. Found throughout Canada, Central America, Mexico, and the United States, these religious communities include more than 200 different groups with 800,000 members in 17 countries. Through 340 short entries, Kraybill offers readers information on a wide range of topics related to religious views and social practices. With thoughtful consideration of how these diverse communities are related, this compact reference provides a brief and accurate synopsis of these groups in the twenty-first century. No other single volume provides such a broad overview of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites in North America. Organized for ease of searching—with a list of entries, a topic finder, an index of names, and ample cross-references—the volume also includes abundant resources for accessing additional information. Wide in scope, succinct in content, and with directional markers along the way, the Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites is a must-have reference for anyone interested in Anabaptist groups. [Description provided by the publisher] BX4931.3.C67

War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film

This critical text examines the seventy-year history of comic book superheroes on film and in comic books and their reflections of the politics of their time. Superheroes addressed include Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Superman, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. [Description provide by the publisher] PN6714.D53

The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics

This reader brings together more than 200 texts and images in a broad introduction to Guatemala’s history, culture, and politics. [Description provided by the publisher] F1466.G877

The "Origin" Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the "Origin of Species"

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species is one of the most widely cited books in modern science. Yet tackling this classic can be daunting for students and general readers alike because of Darwin's Victorian prose and the complexity and scope of his ideas. The "Origin" Then and Now is a unique guide to Darwin's masterwork, making it accessible to a much wider audience by deconstructing and reorganizing the Origin in a way that allows for a clear explanation of its key concepts. The Origin is examined within the historical context in which it was written, and modern examples are used to reveal how this work remains a relevant and living document for today. [Description provided by the publisher] QH365.O8.R49

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—block by block, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era’s music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year’s Day 1973 to New Year’s Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGB and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. [Description provided by the publisher] ML3477.8.N48

Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam

Scorched Earth is the first book to chronicle the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people and their environment, where, even today, more than 3 million people—including 500,000 children—are sick and dying from birth defects, cancer, and other illnesses that can be directly traced to Agent Orange/dioxin exposure. Weaving first-person accounts with original research, Vietnam War scholar Fred A. Wilcox examines long-term consequences for future generations, laying bare the ongoing monumental tragedy in Vietnam, and calls for the United States government to finally admit its role in chemical warfare in Vietnam. [Description provided by the publisher] RA1242.T44

Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark's gift to the civil rights movement was education. In the mid-1950s, this former public school teacher developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. This vibrantly written biography places Clark (1898-1987) in a long tradition of southern African American activist educators, women who spent their lives teaching citizenship by helping people to help themselves. [Description provided by the publisher] E185.97.C59.C48

Steve Jobs

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. [Description provided by the publisher] QA76.2.J63.

Presidential Elections, 1789-2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data

Presidential Elections is an almanac of the popular vote in every presidential election in American history, analyzed at the county level with histories of each campaign, graphs, and stunning four-color maps. [Description provided by the publisher] JK524.D47

Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon

How does an image become iconic? In Christ to Coke, eminent art historian Martin Kemp offers a highly original look at the main types of visual icons. Lavishly illustrated with 165 color images, this marvelous work illuminates eleven universally recognized images, both historical and contemporary, to see how they arose and how they continue to function in our culture. [Description provided by the publisher] N72.S6.K32

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours. [Description provided by the publisher] E451.H77

The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon

Equally groundbreaking is the book’s willingness to move beyond tidy ideological and racial categories to depict an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals. In the process, the reader is introduced to the extraordinary lives of multifaceted characters such as Wladyslaw Jablonowski, the son of a Polish woman and a black father who died fighting for France and white supremacy. [Description provided by the publisher] F1923.G57

The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality

The 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more--and less--equal. [Description provided by the publisher] E839.B59

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia, co-edited by Richard S. Newman and James W. Mueller, re-examines the significance of Philadelphia antislavery movements from the colonial era through the Civil War. Comprised of scholarly essays by a distinguished group of historians, the book ranges over cultural, economic, social, religious and political landscapes. [Description provided by the publisher] E158.44.A67

Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion

Margaret Sanger became one of the most vocal advocates for birth control at a time when the mere mention of such things was considered not only taboo but a felony. She pioneered the first family-planning clinic—the forerunner to Planned Parenthood—and became a lightning rod for the cause. In recent years, though, Sanger has been largely cast aside by the movement she spawned. In this lively biography, the historian Jean H. Baker argues convincingly that Sanger deserves the vaunted place in feminist history she once held. Trained as a nurse, Sanger saw the dangers of unplanned pregnancy and made contraception her cause. Married and a mother at a relatively early age, she abandoned the trappings of home and family for a globe-trotting life as the figurehead of a movement. Notorious for the sheer number of her affairs, Sanger epitomized the type of “free love” that would become mainstream only at the very end of her life. That she lived long enough to see the creation of the birth control pill, which finally made planned pregnancy a reality, is only fitting. [Description provided by the publisher] HQ764.S3.B35

The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

Whether challenged with taking on a startup, turning a business around, or inheriting a high-performing unit, a new leader's success or failure is determined within the first 90 days on the job. In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers proven strategies for moving successfully into a new role at any point in one's career. The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly. Practical examples illustrate how to learn about new organizations, build teams, create coalitions, secure early wins, and lay the foundation for longer-term success. In addition, Watkins provides strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter, and shows how individuals can protect themselves-emotionally as well as professionally-during what is often an intense and vulnerable period. Concise and actionable, this is the survival guide no new leader should be without. [Description provided by the publisher] HD57.7.W38