History Essays

The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism traces the history of the JDC - an organization founded to aid victims of World War I that has played a significant role in preserving and sustaining Jewish life across the globe.

Recuperando el título de un pequeño cuento con el que la puertorriqueña Rosario Ferré analizó la misoginia literaria en los años noventa, "El coloquio de las perras" pretende ser un homenaje a las escritoras hispanohablantes que sortearon todo tipo de obstáculos para hacer su literatura. Desde populares figuras como Elena Garro, Gabriela Mistral o Alejandra Pizarnik hasta otras más desconocidas como Alcira Soust Scaffo, Agustina González López o María Emilia Cornejo, la periodista y poeta Luna Miguel entabla una conversación llena de ladridos con una docena de mujeres...

As any fan of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic rereader of books. In 2008, then-new science fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her rereading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor. Now this volume presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.

Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of 14 people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by Cayuse Indians. Whitman's role as a white woman drawn in to "settle" the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney's own family.

This collection of short essays examines the place of women in the history of psychedelics. While some of the subjects are pioneers in their own right, the authors in this collection go beyond merely adding women to the past in psychedelic history, exploring some of the significant ways that women have contributed to psychedelic knowledge.

Everyone’s a critic, especially in the digital age—but no one takes on the movies like multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison. Renowned both for fiction (A Boy and His Dog) and pop-culture commentary (The Glass Teat), Ellison offers in this collection twenty-five years’ worth of essays and film criticism.

Fun, bright, and playful, Power Pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, Power Pop has meant many things to many people. In Go Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

Michel de Montaigne, one of the foremost writers of the French Renaissance and the originator of the genre of the essay, wrote on subjects ranging from friendship to imagination, from language to conscience. This collection includes 22 of Montaigne's essays, including "Of Prognostications," "Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes," "Of Pedantry," and "Of Friendship."

La Storia della letteratura italiana, completata nel 1871 è la principale opera di Francesco De Sanctis, il più grande critico letterario e saggista italiano dell'Ottocento: essa costituisce la prima grande sintesi organica di tutta la letteratura italiana. L'opera, che non deve essere considerata un manuale di consultazione ma una sintesi ardente di tutta l'intera storia della società italiana vista attraverso le opere letterarie, si svolge con un forte ritmo narrativo dove i personaggi sono gli autori e i loro testi.

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume - featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight - are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, and more.

Here's a sly, dry, hilarious collection of essays, his first in more than 10 years, from the writer who, according to The New York Times Book Review, is "in serious contention for the title of America's most cherished humorist". This time Blount focuses on his own dueling loyalties across the great American divide, North vs. South.

In this 10th anniversary edition, renowned political commentator Cokie Roberts once again examines the nature of women's roles. From mother to mechanic, sister to soldier, Roberts reveals how much progress has now been made and how much further we have to go. Updated and expanded to include a diverse new cast of women, including Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Billie Jean King, and others, this collection of essays offers tremendous insight into the opportunities and challenges that women encounter today.

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

When the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who writes with equal virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers told him, "You have the most precious gift of all - originality." That quality is abundantly evident in this selection of essays. They cover 40 years in the life of a maverick intellectual who can be, at whim, astonishingly provocative, self-mockingly funny, and richly anecdotal.

Many creatures lurk in the dark, weaving on top of one another, roiling together like waves on the night sea. The darkness forms in layers to encompass the land, fill the corners, and obscure angles. Untold mysteries lie just beyond reach told in many tongues, many inflections, many rhythms. The stories are many. Innumerable. Legion.

Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002) was not only one of the most magnificent writers who ever lived — winning honors such as the Newbery Medal, Newbery Honor, National Book Award, and the Coretta Scott King Award for classics like The House of Dies Drear, The People Could Fly, M. C. Higgins the Great, and Her Stories — she was one of the greatest thinkers we ever had on children's literature.

A collection of charming anecdotes, written with sophistication and taken from Michał Rusinek's life. They all start with an unfortunate use of some word or with a language puzzle. This book is a great feast for the lovers of anecdote, classy sense of humor, and beautiful, erudite use of the Polish language. ALERT: You won't find better Polish than written by Rusinek.

First, Catch is a cookbook without recipes, an invitation to journey through the digressive mind of a chef at work, and a hymn to a singular nine-dish festive spring lunch. In Eagle’s kitchen, open shelves reveal colorful jars of vegetables pickling over months, and a soffritto of onions, celery, and carrots cook slowly under a watchful gaze in a skillet heavy enough to double as a murder weapon. He is a tour guide to the world of ingredients, a culinary explorer, and thoughtful commentator on the ways immigration, technology, and fashion has changed the way we eat.

In this collection of natural-history essays, biologist Joan Maloof embarks on a series of lively, fact-filled expeditions into forests of the eastern United States. Through Maloof's engaging, conversational style, each essay offers a lesson in stewardship as it explores the interwoven connections between a tree species and the animals and insects whose lives depend on it - and who, in turn, work to ensure the tree's survival.

Deported to a concentration camp from 1941 until the end of the war, Norman Manea again left his native Romania in 1986 to escape the Ceausescu regime. He now lives in New York. In this selection of essays, he explores the language and psyche of the exiled writer. Among pieces on the cultural-political landscape of Eastern Europe and on the North America of today, there are astute critiques of fellow Romanian and American writers. Manea answers essential questions on censorship and on linguistic roots.