"An important part of American history told with a clear-eyed and forceful brilliance." -National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson
"We Refuse to Forget reminds readers, on damn near every page, that we are collectively experiencing a brilliance we've seldom seen or imagined…We Refuse to Forget is a new standard in book-making." -Kiese Laymon, author of the bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir
A landmark work of untold American history that reshapes our understanding of identity, race, and belonging
In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the U.S. government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. Yet this equality was shredded in the 1970s when tribal leaders revoked the citizenship of Black Creeks, even those who could trace their history back generations-even to Cow Tom himself.
Why did this happen? How was the U.S. government involved? And what are Cow Tom's descendants and other Black Creeks doing to regain their citizenship? These are some of the questions that Gayle explores in this provocative examination of racial and ethnic identity. By delving into the history and interviewing Black Creeks who are fighting to have their citizenship reinstated, he lays bare the racism and greed at the heart of this story. We Refuse to Forget is an eye-opening account that challenges our preconceptions of identity as it shines new light on the long shadows of white supremacy and marginalization that continue to hamper progress for Black Americans.
Read by the authors.
We can heal our communities--one friendship at a time.
Many of us want to do something to improve race relations, but we don't know where to start or even if we can make a difference. In Life-Changing Cross-Cultural Friendships, beloved authors and good friends Gary Chapman and Clarence Shuler answer those questions and more by recounting their own story together.
Long before Gary was the bestselling author of The 5 Love Languages and Clarence was the president and CEO of Building Lasting Relationships, they were just an associate pastor and a young high school student, bonded by a love of Christ and learning how to navigate their newly desegregated community. Decades of friendship later, they are sharing the important lessons they learned that will enable you to experience enriching friendships across racial and ethnic barriers.
Each chapter of this inspiring and practical book will guide you into a deeper level of understanding about what friendship is and about the benefits of cross-cultural friendships on an individual and national level. These powerful lessons will include:
- The importance of choosing the right words
- How to differentiate true friends from mere acquaintances
- How Jesus initiated a cross-cultural relationship
- The first two steps to your own cross-cultural friendship
- Three ways to resolve conflict in a cross-cultural friendship
- How to make friendships last through life's many seasons
Breaking down the walls of division might not be easy, but the simple act of building friendships tears down walls of racism and fear. Will you accept the cross-cultural friendship challenge?
Reflection questions are included in the audiobook companion PDF download.
The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets without Honor tells the story of the attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict.
Ben-Ami challenges the funereal historiography that emerged in the wake of the Camp David process, when Israelis and Palestinians engaged in the Sisyphean task of breaking the taboos surrounding the conflict. The Clinton Peace Parameters that emerged out of this process eventually became the litmus test of every serious peace proposal in the future. But all-or-nothing theological fanaticism and a lack of bold and enlightened leadership have made these attempts at peace-making a defining failure of the two-state concept. Ben-Ami scrutinizes the ominous alternatives to the two-state solution, such as the binational state and Donald Trump's Deal of the Century. He also examines the merits of a Jordanian-Palestinian solution. In discussing Palestine from a comparative perspective, he underlines its singularity while also shedding light on the dilemmas that stand at the center of any peace enterprise.
One of the earliest works of feminist philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman advocates for the education of women in a time where the opposite belief was predominately held. Written during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's work had a significant impact on those advocating for women's rights during the nineteenth century.
Written by political activist and revolutionary Thomas Paine, Rights of Man defends the French Revolution and argued for written constitutions, welfare, and widespread education for all. Published in two parts in 1791 and 1792, it was a direct response to Edmund Burke's attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France that was released in 1790. Born in England, Thomas Paine became an avid American activist who inspired patriots to declare independence to create the United States of America. Rights of Man advocates for political revolution when the government fails to safeguard the natural rights of its people.
When the eleven- and twelve-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA All-Star team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry, and the southern way of life. When all the white teams withdrew in protest, the Cannon Street team won the state tournament. If the team had won the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, it would have advanced to the Little League World Series. But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible to play in the tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, denying the boys their dream of playing in the Little League World Series. Little League Baseball invited the Cannon Street All-Stars to be the organization's guests at the World Series, where they heard spectators yell, 'Let them play! Let them play!' when the ballplayers were introduced.
Stolen Dreams is the story of the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and of the early civil rights movement. It's also the story of centuries of bigotry in Charleston, South Carolina-where millions of enslaved people were brought to this country and where the Civil War began, where segregation remained for a century after the war ended and anyone who challenged it did so at their own risk.
Claremont Institute scholar Edward J. Erler argues that, to preserve our dwindling individual freedoms, Americans must mount a defense of the nation state against the encroaching progressive forces of global governance.
The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State argues that to preserve our freedom Americans must mount a defense of the nation state against the progressive forces who advocate for global government. The Founders of America were convinced that freedom would flourish only in a nation state. A nation state is a collection of citizens who share a commitment to the same principles. Today, the nation state is under attack by the progressive Left, who allege that it is the source of almost every evil in the world.
A lucid and inspiring consideration of the challenges we and our world now face, and a proposal for a way to overcome them
Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face?
Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries, and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not-impossible extreme, might be extinction?
To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world: climate change, technology, and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects. As extreme weather events increase in frequency, advances in AI and military technology accelerate, and inequities deepen everywhere, the question of how to confront the world’s various problems becomes even more urgent.
If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement, the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia—the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE.
O Discurso da servidão voluntária de Étienne de La Boétie é uma análise política sobre a obediência. Afirma que estados e governos são mais vulneráveis do que as pessoas imaginam e podem entrar em colapso em um instante: assim que o consentimento dos governados é retirado. Esta é a fascinante tese defendida por La Boétie.
Em tempos que corporações e governos ampliam de forma nunca antes imaginada o controle e poder sobre a população, este livro, escrito há quase 500 anos, é verdadeiramente o traço profético de nossos tempos.
O conciso texto tem uma importância vital para o leitor moderno – uma importância que vai além do puro prazer de ler uma grande obra original sobre filosofia política ou, para o libertário, de ler o primeiro filósofo político dessa escola. O autor antecipou Jefferson, Thoreau, Arendt, Gandhi e Luther King. O ensaio tem profunda relevância para a compreensão da história sendo o grande inspirador da desobediência civil.
Como é possível ir de um mundo de tirania para um mundo de liberdade? Exatamente devido a sua metodologia abstrata e atemporal, La Boétie oferece perspectivas vitais sobre este eterno problema, afirmando que os estados e governos são mais vulneráveis do que as pessoas imaginam.
For the past twelve years, the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report has ranked Iceland number one on its list of countries closing the gap in equality between men and women. What is it about Iceland that makes many women's experience there so positive? Why has their society made such meaningful progress in this ongoing battle, from electing the world's first female president to passing legislation specifically designed to help even the playing field at work and at home? And how can we learn from what Icelanders have already discovered about women's powerful place in society and how increased fairness benefits everyone?
Eliza Reid, the First Lady of Iceland, examines her adopted homeland's attitude toward women-the deep-seated cultural sense of fairness, the influence of current and historical role models, and, crucially, the areas where Iceland still has room for improvement. Reid's own experience as an immigrant from small-town Canada who never expected to become a first lady is expertly interwoven with interviews with dozens of sprakkar ('extraordinary women') to form the backbone of an illuminating discussion of what it means to move through the world as a woman, and how the rules of society play more of a role in who we view as 'equal' than we may understand.
A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before it's too late-from the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight
Voting is our most important right as Americans-"the right that protects all the others," as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act-but it's also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump's effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril.
But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away since Shelby-a case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted.
Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the country's leading advocates.
Defying the Dragon tells a remarkable story of audacity: of how the people of Hong Kong challenged the PRC's authority, just as its president reached the height of his powers. Is Xi's China as unshakeable as it seems? What are its real interests in Hong Kong? Why are Beijing's time-honored means of control no longer working there? And where does this leave Hongkongers themselves?
Stephen Vines has lived in Hong Kong for over three decades. His book shrewdly unpacks the Hong Kong-China relationship and its wider significance-right up to the astonishing convergence of political turmoil and international crisis with Covid-19 and the 2020-21 crackdown.
Vividly describing the uprising from street level, Vines explains how and why it unfolded, and its global repercussions. Now, the international community is reassessing relations with Beijing, just as Hong Kong's rebellion and China's handling of the pandemic have exposed the regime's weakness. In a crisis that has become existential all round, what lies ahead for Hong Kong, China and the world?
