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Audiobooks Narrated by William Andrew Quinn
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Created in a world of empires, the United States was to be something new: an expansive republic proclaiming commitments to liberty and equality but eager to extend its territory and influence. Yet from the beginning, Native powers, free and enslaved Black people, and foreign subjects perceived, interacted with, and resisted the young republic as if it was merely another empire. Such perspectives have driven scholars to reevaluate the early United States, as the parameters of early American history have expanded in Atlantic, continental, and global directions.
The essays gathered in The Early Imperial Republic move beyond the question of whether the new republic was an empire, investigating instead where, how, and why it was one. They use the category of empire to situate the early United States in the global context its contemporaries understood, drawing important connections between territorial conquests on the continent and American incursions. In tracing these stories, the volume's contributors bring the study of early United States imperialism down to earth, encouraging us to see the exertion of United States power on the ground as a process that drew upon the example of its imperial predecessors and was forced to grapple with their legacies. They argue that American empire was never confined to one era but is instead a thread throughout history.
The bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali-with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie
On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was 'a new kind of black man' who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism.
No one has captured Ali-and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated-with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of the New Yorker). In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness. He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and bone-breaking mobsters; of the baleful Liston and the haunted Patterson; of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm X. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed, grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time.
Selfishness, pride, and hostility dominate the headlines, social media, and everyday interactions. But what if every Christian did one simple act of kindness each week? What if offering to carry groceries for someone who is struggling could spark a revolution?
With rousing encouragement and biblical insight, Dr. Tony Evans shows how, when we let the kindness of God change us, we can change the world. Through real-life examples and practical teaching, he empowers each of us to
- replace hurtful speech with helpful speech
- choose honor over hate
- recognize everyday opportunities to spread God's love
- discover the courage to step out in kindness
Kindness is catching. It's time to let God's love ignite a countercultural movement that overcomes evil with good.
The stories of thirteen Black Minor League baseball players during the post-Jackie Robinson era, from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, who were figuratively and literally left behind even as both baseball and the country claimed a newfound racial progressiveness.
Racism continues to infuse Congress's daily practice of lawmaking and shape who obtains congressional employment. In this timely and provocative book, James Jones reveals how and why many who work in Congress call it the 'Last Plantation.' He shows that even as the civil rights movement gained momentum and antidiscrimination laws were implemented, Congress remained exempt from federal workplace protections. These exemptions institutionalized inequality in the congressional workplace well into the twenty-first century.
Jones uncovers the hidden dynamics of power, privilege, and resistance in Congress. He reveals how failures of racial representation among congressional staffers reverberate throughout the American political system and demonstrates how the absence of diverse perspectives hampers the creation of just legislation. Centering the experiences of Black workers within this complex landscape, he provides insights into the problems they face, the barriers that hinder their progress, and the ways they contest entrenched inequality.
A must-listen for anyone concerned about social justice and the future of our democracy, The Last Plantation exposes the mechanisms that perpetuate racial inequality in the halls of Congress and challenges us to confront and transform this unequal workplace that shapes our politics and society.
When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group's conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume's contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.
The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.
When sixteen-year-old Keith Merith finds himself pulled over, berated, and degraded by a white police officer, he's outraged. He's done nothing wrong. But the officer has the power, and he doesn't. From that day on, he vows to join a police service and effect change from within.
Twelve years and a multitude of infuriating applications later, Merith is finally hired by York Regional Police. Subjected to unfair treatment and microaggressions, he perseveres and gradually rises through the ranks, his goal of systemic change carrying him through. After a stellar career, Merith retires at the rank of superintendent, but his desire for sustained and equitable reform is stronger than ever.
In A Darker Shade of Blue, Merith shares both his gut-wrenching and heart-warming experiences and advocates for immediate police reform in a balanced and level-headed manner. He praises the people in blue, but he also knows on a visceral level that there are deep issues that need to be rectified-starting with recruitment. He knows that law enforcement agencies should reflect the communities they serve, and that all citizens should be treated equally. Entrusted with the duty to serve, Merith delivers an evocative perspective of policing by providing the opportunity to walk in his shoes, as a Black man, and as a police officer on the front lines.
What should conversations about race look and sound like in the elementary classroom? And how can we build classroom communities that encourage these meaningful conversations about race?
Matthew Kay and Jennifer Orr take on these questions and more in We're Gonna Keep On Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom. This book focuses on the unique and powerful role discussions about race can play in the elementary classroom.
Drawing its title inspiration from the freedom song 'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,' sung by hundreds of children marching against segregation in the Children's Crusade of 1963, We're Gonna Keep On Talking is written for teachers who are willing to match children's courage and brilliance.
Writing with the humility and honest storytelling of two career classroom teachers, Matthew Kay and Jennifer Orr share:
- Strategies for building safe and supportive classroom and school spaces for productive discourse
- Dozens of practical teacher moves for facilitating race conversations
- Classroom stories that allow listeners to envision ways into the work through picture books, art, graphs, and current events.
Deaths resulting from interactions with the US criminal legal system are a public health emergency, but the scope of this issue is intentionally ignored by the very systems that are supposed to be tracking these fatalities. In order to make a real difference and address this human rights problem, researchers and policy makers need reliable data.
In Death in Custody, Roger A. Mitchell Jr., MD, and Jay D. Aronson, PhD, share the stories of individuals who died in custody and chronicle the efforts of activists and journalists to uncover the true scope of deaths in custody. From Ida B. Wells's enumeration of extrajudicial lynchings more than a century ago to the Washington Post's current effort to count police shootings, the work of journalists and independent groups has always been more reliable than the state's official reports.
Mitchell and Aronson outline a practical, achievable system for accurately recording and investigating these deaths. They argue for a straightforward public health solution: adding a simple checkbox to the US Standard Death Certificate that would create an objective way of recording whether a death occurred in custody. These tangible solutions would allow us to see the full scope of the problem and give us the chance to truly address it.
While we can all recall images of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his 'I Have a Dream' speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin.
This was far from Rustin's first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King by helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolent resistance. Rustin's legacy touches many areas of contemporary life-from civil resistance to violent uprisings, democracy to socialism, and criminal justice reform to war resistance.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was often relegated to the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. This volume draws a full picture of Bayard Rustin: a gay, pacifist, socialist political radical who changed the course of US history and set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from LGBTQ+ Pride to Black Lives Matter.
The rise and fall of one of America's first Black sports celebrities
Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes-and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all.
At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences.
Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy's troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy's personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.
Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a 'nation of immigrants,' the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration.
Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy. In the century after the American Revolution, states controlled mobility within and across their borders. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that, if Congress gained control over immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and the interstate slave trade. The Civil War and the abolition of slavery removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy. Admission remained the norm for Europeans, but Chinese laborers were excluded through techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures, the Supreme Court ruled that immigration authority was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification.
