Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond.
When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, the cycle finally ended when he received the news that his mother had died.
In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.
'A fast-paced, compelling narrative that goes far beyond the headlines.' -KEVIN DONOVAN, author of The Billionaire Murders
For Joey Philion, surviving the fire was only the beginning.
On the morning of March 10th, 1988, in Orillia, Ontario, a house fire engulfed fourteen-year-old Joey Philion in flames. He suffered third degree burns on ninety-five percent of his body. Doctors didn't think he would make it through the night.
After the Flames is about one of the world's most famous burn victims: his incredible survival, his nightmarish path to recovery that helped revolutionize medical treatment for burn victims worldwide, the fame thrust upon him after he was declared a hero from the media, and the tumultuous years that followed, most of which were spent under the microscope of an unforgiving public eye.
The story also follows Joey's family, including his mother Linda, stepfather Mike, and younger brother Danny, all of whom endured their own tremendous hardships in the wake of a fire that changed their lives forever.
J. E. B. Stuart: The Soldier and the Man is the first thoroughly scrutinized study of the life and service of the Civil War's most famous cavalryman. James Ewell Brown Stuart led the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry to the all-but-complete satisfaction of his superiors. Being human, Stuart occasionally underperformed. He underestimated his opponents, took unnecessary risks with his command, failed to properly discipline and motivate his troopers, and was prone to errors both strategic and tactical. Because of his outsized wartime reputation, most of Stuart's errors have passed virtually unnoticed or, when addressed, have been excused or explained away.
Edward Longacre's study probes not only Stuart's military career but elements of his character that invite investigation. Even his fiercest partisans admitted that he was vain and inordinately sensitive to criticism, with a streak of immaturity-at times the hard-edged veteran, at other times a devotee of the pageantry of war. Motivated by appeals to vanity, he curried the patronage of powerful men and responded to the attentions of attractive women even though he was a married man. Personal flaws aside, Stuart was popular with his officers and men, beloved by his staff, and considered the beau ideal of Confederate soldiery. The distinction endures today. This book is an attempt to determine its validity.
An ancient prophecy.
A destiny of flame.
A war to end two worlds . . .
A dark prophecy binds Cora's fate to the fae realm-a world that would have been her doom if she hadn't escaped with her life. Now she's determined to put destiny behind her and focus on her world, her kingdom, and her much-anticipated wedding.
But when dragons emerge from the veil between worlds, threatening her land with deadly flame, she must return to the fae and make allies of those who had once condemned her to die.
Yet dragons and fae are the least of her foes. Her greatest enemy marches on her kingdom, and he won't stop until he controls fae magic. Fate and fire collide, but Cora isn't alone. She, Teryn, Mareleau, and Larylis each have a role to play in protecting two realms from an ancient king who can walk between worlds.
When the dust clears and the ashes settle, will the embers of hope remain?
The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.
As An Unholy Traffic shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation.
Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K. D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.
A searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of policing in the United States
Contrary to competing popular beliefs, police violence against African Americans has neither remained unchanged since the era of slavery nor is it a recent phenomenon disconnected from the past. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.
Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Adler explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terrorexplores both the rise of these trends and their chilling persistence, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow continues to haunt the nation.
“Jeffrey S. Adler’s analysis of New Orleans applies to the entire country and provides key insights as to how we arrived at our present crisis.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Since its first publication in 1981, Daughters of Copper Woman has become an underground classic, selling over 200,000 copies. Now comes a new edition that includes many pieces cut from the original as well as fresh material added by the author. Here finally, after twenty-two years of gathering dust, is the complete version of the groundbreaking bestseller.
In this, her best-loved work, Anne Cameron has created a timeless retelling of northwest coast Native myths that together create a sublime image of the social and spiritual power of woman. Cameron weaves together the lives of legendary and imaginary characters, creating a work of fiction with an intensity of style matched by the power of its subject.
From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken. But just two years after returning to Britain, the forty-year-old Vancouver, hounded by critics, shamed by public humiliation at the fists of an aristocratic sailor he had flogged, and blacklisted because of a perceived failure to follow the Admiralty's directives, died in poverty, nearly forgotten. In this riveting and perceptive biography, historian Stephen Bown delves into the events that destroyed Vancouver's reputation and restores his position as one of the greatest explorers of the Age of Discovery.
The vivid and masterful story of an American original—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—whose own life was remade by art
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture—all in evocative, intimately personal arrangements.
An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty provides compelling insight into the multilayered self-portrait encoded in the museum’s objects and rooms—and delivers the absorbing story of a life every bit as dazzling and haunting.
Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner as she turned twenty. She was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child, a beloved boy, not yet two years old.
But in time came friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; and collecting beautiful things with a keen eye and competitive pace—all these were balm for loss. Henry James and John Singer Sargent—whose portrait of Isabella was a masterpiece and a scandal—came to recognize her originality. Bernard Berenson, leading connoisseur of the Italian Renaissance, was her art dealer.
From award-winning author Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty is the story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.
From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, a breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.
In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland's potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children-and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York: by 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland. These so-called "Famine Irish" were the forebears of four U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) yet when they arrived in America they were consigned to the lowest-paying jobs and subjected to discrimination and ridicule by their new countrymen. Even today, the popular perception of these immigrants is one of destitution and despair. But when we let the Famine Irish narrate their own stories, they paint a far different picture.
In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation's individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on newly available records and an astonishing ten-year research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the refugees who settled in New York City and helped reshape the entire nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force-a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story.
Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling 'the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,' as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.
In A Muslim American Slave, Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it.
This edition presents the English translation of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that 'Islam' and 'America' are not mutually exclusive terms.
For the past fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present.
Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts-novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives-that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations-in this case, France, the United States, and Israel.
Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.
