English Civil

June 28, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.

This sweeping survey of Black history shows how Black humanity has been erased and how its recovery can save the humanity of us all. Using history as a foundation, The Humanity Archive uses storytelling techniques to make history come alive and uncover the truth behind America's whitewashed history. The Humanity Archive focuses on the overlooked narratives in the pages of the past. Challenging dominant perspectives, author Jermaine Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories.

In this comprehensive biography, Jean Edward Smith reconciles conflicting assessments of Grant's life, arguing that Grant is greatly underrated as a president. Following the turmoil of Andrew Johnson's administration, Grant guided the nation through the post-Civil War era, overseeing Reconstruction of the South and enforcing the freedoms of new African-American citizens. His presidential accomplishments were as considerable as his military victories, for the same strength of character that made him successful on the battlefield also characterized his years in the White House.

Jennifer Chiaverini's New York Times best-selling Elm Creek Quilt novels, with their irresistible blend of storytelling magic and quilting lore, have captured the hearts of countless fans. In this moving novel about morality, freedom, and the power of human courage, Chiaverini whisks listeners back to antebellum America.

In this epic 1885 work, General Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States and staunch supporter of the Union cause, set the record straight on his storied life and career. At its heart is Grant, victor and eyewitness to the defining moments of the Civil War, including the Battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga, and the Wilderness; the Siege of Vicksburg; and the Appomattox campaign, which concluded with the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

On March 22, 2023, the Swedish Academy organized a conference on threats to democracy and freedom of expression featuring a slate of distinguished speakers including Arundhati Roy, Timothy Snyder, and Sofi Oksanen. Oksanen’s address—entitled “Putin's War on Women”— would go on to spark such interest that the acclaimed Finnish writer felt compelled to return to it as the basis for a larger, more in-depth look at Putin’s threat to women. The result is Same River, Twice, a devastating book-length essay that incisively builds on the themes and arguments first presented in her powerful speech.

Do you have what it takes to run off and join the army, leaving your family behind? That’s what John Lincoln Clem, a nine-year-old boy living in Ohio, does as the American Civil War rages on. In 1861, Johnny sneaks onto a train filled with men from the 3rd Ohio Union Regiment, determined to fight for his country. Taken in by the older soldiers, Johnny becomes a drummer boy—not to mention the youngest person to serve in the war. Living a soldier’s life, Johnny experiences the brutalities of battle and the hunger and illness in between.

The Colley family is made of modest farmers in the Missouri Ozarks. Although Southerners, the Colleys try to remain neutral, a fact ignored by the Union militia who confiscate their livestock, burn their farm, and arrest their daughter, Adair, on charges of “enemy collaboration”. Yet as this innocent young woman soon discovers, fate can have a double edge. While imprisoned, she falls in love with her interrogator, a Union major who helps her escape.

One hundred and fifty years after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still captures the American imagination, and its reverberations can still be felt throughout America's social and political landscape. Louis P. Masur's The Civil War: A Concise History offers a masterful and eminently listenable overview of the war's multiple causes and catastrophic effects. Masur begins by examining the complex origins of the war, focusing on the pulsating tensions over states rights and slavery.

At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.

Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe and a founder of the American Indian Movement, is one of the most influential Indian leaders of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the first time and also traces the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....

Of the great figure in 20th-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age 39. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man.

By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice. But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president. The Court at War explores this pivotal period.

Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes.

On a cold day in early January 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis "The time is at hand when, if an attempt can be made to capture the enemy's forces at New Berne, it should be done." Over the next few months, Lee's dispatch would precipitate a momentous series of events as the Confederates, threatened by a supply crisis and an emerging peace movement, sought to seize Federal bases in eastern North Carolina.

Contained here is Julius Caesar's account of his activities following the Gallic Wars, in three books that detail his retaliation to a political conspiracy in Rome, leading to conflicts against his own countrymen and rival general Pompey. It is uniquely presented in Caesar's first-person perspective (the original Latin is in the third-person perspective). This production is based on a translation of the work by W.A. McDevitte and W.S. Bohn published in New York in 1869.

First published in 1962, Negroes with Guns is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

Union tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood.

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond.