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We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama
by E. J. Dionne Jr. Joy-Ann ReidA collection of Barack Obama's greatest speeches selected and introduced by columnist E. J. Dionne and MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid. We Are the Change We Seek is a collection of Barack Obama's 26 greatest addresses: beginning with his 2002 speech opposing the Iraq War and closing with his final speech before the United Nations in September 2016. As president, Obama's words had the power to move the country, and often the world, as few presidents before him. Whether acting as Commander in Chief or Consoler in Chief, Obama adopted a unique rhetorical style that could simultaneously speak to the national mood and change the course of public events. Obama's eloquence, both written and spoken, propelled him to national prominence and ultimately made it possible for the son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas to become the first black president of the United States. These speeches span Obama's career--from his time in state government through to the end of his tenure as president--and the issues most important to our time: war, inequality, race relations, gun violence and human rights. The book opens with an essay placing Obama's oratorical contributions within the flow of American history by E. J. Dionne Jr. , columnist and author ofWhy The Right Went Wrong, and Joy Reid, the host ofAM Joyon MSNBC and author ofFracture.
The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco
by Joshua GamsonA journey back through the music, madness, and unparalleled freedom of an era of change--the '70s--as told through the life of ultra-fabulous superstar Sylvester. Imagine a pied piper singing in a dazzling falsetto, wearing glittering sequins, and leading the young people of the nation to San Francisco and on to liberation where nothing was straight-laced or old-fashioned. And everyone, finally, was welcome to come as themselves. This is not a fairy tale. This was real, mighty real, and disco sensation Sylvester was the piper. Joshua Gamson--a Yale-trained pop culture expert--uses him, a boy who would be fabulous, to lead us through the story of the '70s when a new era of change liberated us from conformity and boredom. Gamson captures the exuberant life, feeling, energy, and fun of a generation's wonderful, magical waking up-from the parties to the dancing and music. The story begins with a little black boy who started with nothing but a really big voice. We follow him from the Gospel chorus to the glory days in the Castro where a generation shook off its shame as Sylvester sang and began his rise as part of a now-notorious theatrical troupe called the Cockettes. Celebrity, sociology, and music history mingle and merge around this endlessly entertaining story of a singer who embodied the freedom, spirit, and flamboyance of a golden moment in American culture.
Hero of Flight 93: Mark Bingham
by Jon BarrettStory of Mark Bingham's life and re-creation of the events of 9-11.
Let the Faggots Burn: The Upstairs Lounge Fire
by Johnny TownsendOn Gay Pride Day in 1973, someone set the entrance to a French Quarter gay bar on fire. In the terrible inferno that followed, thirty-two people lost their lives, including a third of the local congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church, their pastor burning to death halfway out a second-story window as he tried to claw his way to freedom. A mother who'd gone to the bar with her two gay sons died alongside them. A man who'd helped his friend escape first was found dead near the fire escape. Two children waited outside of a movie theater across town for a father and step-father who would never pick them up. During this era of rampant homophobia, several families refused to claim the bodies, and many churches refused to bury the dead. Author Johnny Townsend pored through old records and tracked down survivors of the fire and relatives and friends of those killed to compile this fascinating account of a forgotten moment in gay history.
The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During The Great War
by John W. Dean James David RobenaltWarren Harding fell in love with his beautiful neighbor, Carrie Phillips, in the summer of 1905, almost a decade before he was elected a United States Senator and fifteen years before he became the 29th President of the United States. When the two lovers started their long-term and torrid affair, neither of them could have foreseen that their relationship would play out against one of the greatest wars in world history - the First World War. Harding would become a Senator with the power to vote for war; Mrs. Phillips and her daughter would become German agents, spying on a U. S. training camp on Long Island in the hopes of gauging for the Germans the pace of mobilization of the U. S. Army for entry into the battlefields in France. Based on over 800 pages of correspondence discovered in the 1960s but under seal ever since in the Library of Congress, The Harding Affair will tell the unknown stories of Harding as a powerful Senator and his personal and political life, including his complicated romance with Mrs. Phillips. The book will also explore the reasons for the entry of the United States into the European conflict and explain why so many Americans at the time supported Germany, even after the U. S. became involved in the spring of 1917. James David Robenalt's comprehensive study of the letters is set in a narrative that weaves in a real-life spy story with the story of Harding's not accidental rise to the presidency.
Washington's Monument: And the Fascinating History of the Obelisk
by John Steele GordonThe colorful story behind one of America's greatest monuments and of the ancient obelisks of Egypt, now scattered around the world. Conceived soon after the American Revolution ended, the great monument to George Washington was not finally completed until almost a century later; the great obelisk was finished in 1884, and remains the tallest stone structure in the world at 555 feet. The story behind its construction is a largely untold and intriguing piece of American history, which acclaimed historian John Steele Gordon relates with verve, connecting it to the colorful saga of the ancient obelisks of Egypt. Nobody knows how many obelisks were crafted in ancient Egypt, or even exactly how they were created and erected since they are made out of hard granite and few known tools of the time were strong enough to work granite. Generally placed in pairs at the entrances to temples, they have in modern times been ingeniously transported around the world to Istanbul, Paris, London, New York, and many other locations. Their stories illuminate that of the Washington Monument, once again open to the public following earthquake damage, and offer a new appreciation for perhaps the most iconic memorial in the country.
The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President
by John PradosTranscripts of tape recordings beginning with Roosevelt.
Papa John: The Autobiography Of John Phillips
by John Phillips Jim JeromeSex, drugs, and rock 'n ' roll. It was the anthem of the sixties. The psychedelic code by which many lived --and died. And John Phillips, legendary founder and songwriter of the Mamas and the Papas, experienced it all. Now Phillips takes us on a dizzying roller-coaster ride from stardom in L.A. to drug busts in the Big Apple. In an intimate, gritty, all- too-true self-portrait, he offers a startling, reflective look at the turbulent sixties and beyond.
Remembrances of the Angels: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective on the Fire No One Can Forget
by John KuensterOn a terrible day in December 1958, one of the deadliest fires in American history took the lives of ninety-two children and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago. The tragedy shocked the nation, tore apart a community with grief and anger, left many families physically and psychologically scarred for life, and prompted a mystery unresolved to this day. It also led to a complete overhaul of fire safety standards for American schools. The story of that fire was eloquently told ten years ago by John Kuenster and David Cowan in their best-selling book To Sleep with the Angels. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the fire, John Kuenster returns to talk with children, parents, firemen, reporters, clergy, nurses, policemen, school officials, and others who were in some way connected with the disaster. Together their thoughts and feelings about their experience, still vivid and tender after a half-century, make Remembrances of the Angels a moving and often tearful book.
To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire
by David Cowan John KuensterOn a grey winter day in December 1958, one of the deadliest fires in American history took the lives of ninety-two children and three nuns at a Catholic elementary school on Chicago’s West Side. The blaze at Our Lady of the Angels School shocked the nation, tore apart a community, left a mystery unsolved to this day, sowed popular suspicion of the church and city fathers, and prompted nationwide fire safety reform in American schools. In To Sleep with the Angels, two veteran journalists tell the moving story of the fire and its consequences. It is a tale of ordinary people caught up in a mind-numbing disaster.
Fire in the Grove: The Cocoanut Grove Tragedy and Its Aftermath
by John C. EspositoOn Saturday night, November 28. 1942, Boston suffered its worst disaster ever. At the city's premier nightspot, the Cocoanut Grove, the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history took the lives of 492 people—nearly one of every two people on the premises. It spread through the overcrowded club with breathtaking speed. In a mere eight minutes anyone left inside was either dead or doomed. Against the backdrop of Boston politics, cronyism, and corruption, author John C. Esposito re-creates the drama of the fire and explores the public outcry that followed. In retelling the horrific events of one of America's most cataclysmic tragedies, Esposito has fashioned both a gripping narrative and a vibrant portrait of the era.
Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America's Deadliest Rock Concert
by John BarylickOn February 20, 2003, the deadliest rock concert in U.S. history took place at a roadhouse called The Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island. That night, in the few minutes it takes to play a hard-rock standard, the fate of many of the unsuspecting nightclub patrons was determined with awful certainty. The blaze was ignited when pyrotechnics set off by Great White, a 1980s heavy-metal band, lit flammable polyurethane “egg crate” foam sound insulation on the club’s walls. In less than 10 minutes, 96 people were dead and 200 more were injured, many catastrophically. The final death toll topped out, three months later, at the eerily unlikely round number of 100. The story of the fire, its causes, and its legal and human aftermath is one of lives put at risk by petty economic decisions―by a band, club owners, promoters, building inspectors, and product manufacturers. Any one of those decisions, made differently, might have averted the tragedy. Together, however, they reached a fatal critical mass. Killer Show is the first comprehensive exploration of the chain of events leading up to the fire, the conflagration itself, and the painstaking search for evidence to hold the guilty to account and obtain justice for the victims. Anyone who has entered an entertainment venue and wondered, “Could I get out of here in a hurry?” will identify with concertgoers at The Station. Fans of disaster nonfiction and forensic thrillers will find ample elements of both genres in Killer Show.
Blue Heaven
by Joe KeenanSet in contemporary New York, Blue Heaven is the hilarious tale of a most unlikely couple and their brilliant plan to earn a fortune in gifts on their way to the altar.
Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier
by Joanne Passet"Whatever else will be said about her--and you can bet there will be plenty, because Barbara was no stranger to controversy--the one thing that is true above all else is that she was the most important person in lesbian publishing in the world. Without her boldness and her audacity, there might not be the robust lesbian publishing industry there is today. ” --Teresa DeCrescenzo Barbara Grier--feminist, activist, publisher, and archivist--was many things to different people. Perhaps most well known as one of the founders of Naiad Press, Barbara’s unapologetic drive to make sure that lesbians everywhere had access to books with stories that reflected their lives in positive ways was legendary. Barbara changed the lives of thousands of women in her lifetime. For the first time, historian Joanne Passet uncovers the controversial and often polarizing life of this firebrand editor and publisher with new and never before published letters, interviews, and other personal material from Grier’s own papers. Passet takes readers behind the scenes of The Ladder, offering a rare window onto the isolated and bereft lives lesbians experienced before the feminist movement and during the earliest days of gay political organizing. Through extensive letters between Grier and her friend novelist Jane Rule, Passet offers a virtual diary of this dramatic and repressive era. Passet also looks at Grier’s infamous "theft” of The Ladder’s mailing list, which in turn allowed her to launch and promote Naiad Press, the groundbreaking women’s publishing company she founded with partner Donna McBride in 1973. Naiad went on to become one of the leaders in gay and lesbian book publishing and for years helped sustain lesbian and feminist bookstores--and readers--across the country. JOANNE PASSET is Professor of History Emerita at Indiana University East. Her previous books include Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality, Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, and Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment (with Mary Niles Maack).
How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
by Joanne MeyerowitzHow Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.
And Chaos Died
by Joanna RussJoanna Russ, famous for her feminist sci-fi novel The Female Man (1975), weaves together a bizarre (and difficult) novel filled with strange images, peculiar characters, and a fragmented/layered/bewildering narrative structure. And Chaos Died (1970) is a startlingly original take on the staple sci-fi themes of telepathy and overpopulation.
On Strike Against God: A Lesbian Love Story
by Joanna RussJoanna Russ's On Strike Against God is remarkable for its deft intertwining of many themes: not only the overt one of coming out, but many intricately (and inevitably) interlaced stories of alienation, a search for community and rebellion against how our society defines women. Some editions are subtitled "A Lesbian Love Story," and it is, but even more, this is a manifesto of modern feminism and an astute, often funny, but also angry look at what it means to be a woman.
What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class and the Future of Feminism
by Joanna RussA study of the future of feminism calls for a return to the radical roots of feminism's direct political struggle during the 1960s and early 1970s and a move away from the de-politicized focus on women's psychology and personal relations of today.
I Will Find You
by Joanna Connors"This is it. My rape. I knew it was coming. Every woman knows. And now here it is. My turn. " When Joanna Connors was thirty years old on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to review a play at a college theater, she was held at knife point and raped by a stranger who had grown up five miles away from her. Once her assailant was caught and sentenced, Joanna never spoke of the trauma again, until 21 years later when her daughter was about to go to college. She resolved then to tell her children about her own rape so they could learn and protect themselves, and she began to realize that the man who assaulted her was one of the formative people in her life. Setting out to uncover the story of her attacker, Connors embarked on a journey to find out who he was, where he came from, who his friends were and what his life was like. What she discovers stretches beyond one violent man's story and back into her own, interweaving a narrative about strength and survival with one about rape culture and violence in America. I Will Find You is a brave, timely consideration of race, class, education and the families that shape who we become, by a reporter and a survivor.
Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People
by Joan RoughgardenA celebration of the enormous diversity of genders and sexuality found in animals and among human cultures. Roughgarden explores how and why this range of bodies and behaviors evolved and exposes how biology, medicine, anthropology and Christianity have obstructed the recognition and acceptance of this diversity.
A Restricted Country
by Joan NestleA proud working-class woman, an “out” lesbian long before the Rainbow revolution, Joan Nestle has stood at the forefront of American freedom struggles from the McCarthy era to the present day. Featuring photographs and a new introduction by the author, this classic collection which intimately accounts the lesbian, feminist and civil rights movements through personal essays is available again for the first time in years.
The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader
by Joan NestleThis anthology of stories, poems, and nonfiction accounts pays homage to a host of femme and butch lesbian relationships that have flourished over four decades.
Turnout: Making Minnesota the State that Votes
by Joan Anderson GroweHigh voter turnout in Minnesota is no accident. It arose from the traditions of this state's early Yankee and northern European immigrants, and it has been sustained by wisely chosen election policies. Many of these policies were designed and implemented during the twenty-four-year tenure of Minnesota Secretary of State Joan Anderson Growe. In inspiring and often funny prose, Growe recounts the events that framed her life and changed the state's voting practices. She grew up in a household that never missed an election. After an astounding grassroots feminist campaign, she was elected to the state legislature in 1972; two years later, she was elected secretary of state, the state';s chief elections administrator. As one of the nation's leading advocates for reliable elections and convenient voting, Growe worked with county officials to secure Election Day registration (used for the first time in 1974) as a Minnesota norm. She brought new technology into elections administration and promoted "motor voter" registration. And as an ardent feminist, she has encouraged and inspired scores of other women to run for office. Part political history and part memoir, this book is a reminder to Minnesotans to cherish and protect their tradition of clean, open elections.
Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives
by Jill Lewis Gloria JosephCOMMON DIFFERENCES is an unprecedented and unparalleled examination and analysis of an alarming schism in the women's movement: the differences between Black and White women's perspectives, attitudes and concerns on key issues. Written from a political perspective that considers sexism, racism, and classism as the major components affecting the attitudes held by Black and White women today, this book presents an overview of women's status through history and discusses the vital issues where common differences occur: sexuality, men and marriage, mothers and daughters, media images, and the direction of the movement itself. The nature of the schism between Black and White women is brought into sharp focus by a brilliant selection of interviews with a spectrum of women -- the rich, the poor and the so-called middle class, the educated and the illiterate, the domestic and the prostitute, professional women and welfare mothers, lesbians and debutantes, radicals and conservatives, and the elderly and the youthful, all make important contributions in explaining their different consciousnesses and needs.