Social Imagination

In Timeless Learning, an award-winning team of leaders, Chief Technology Officer Ira Socol, Superintendent Pam Moran, and Lab Schools Principal Chad Ratliff demonstrate how you can implement innovative practices that have shown remarkable success. The authors use progressive design principles to inform pathways to disrupt traditions of education today and show you how to make real innovations that will have a timeless and meaningful impact on students, keeping alive the natural curiosity and passion for learning with which children enter school.

Spurred by a newfound awareness of false advertising, Stink Moody becomes the proverbial kid in a candy store as his letter-writing campaign yields him heaps of free rewards. When Stink buys a mammoth jawbreaker that doesn't break his jaw, he writes a letter of complaint to the manufacturer — and receives a ten-pound box of 21,280 jawbreakers for his trouble!

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the 20th century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the 400-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.

In the tradition of Jared Diamond's million-copy-selling classic Guns, Germs, and Steel, a bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight.

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.

Do you want to write stories that catch your readers and never let go? Have you ever wondered how to create a book as magical as Ella Enchanted, as touching as Dave at Night, as captivating as Fairest? Well, now you can find out! In Writing Magic, Newbery Honor author Gail Carson Levine shares her secrets of great writing. She shows how you, too, can get terrific ideas for stories, invent great beginnings and endings, write sparkling dialogue, develop memorable characters - and much, much more.

Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California - bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges - seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer; D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture; and Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist.

Is your child having trouble going to sleep, or not sleeping through the night? Good thing there’s Bedtime Stories by renowned child development expert Katie Miller and seasoned teacher Sarah J. Young! With this wonderful two-in-one bundle of wonderfully soothing bedtime stories and meditations, your child will indulge in magnificent meditation stories that help enhance their imagination and promote restful sleep and listen to positive affirmations that raise their self-esteem and self-confidence.

Bella loves the beach. She loves the flip and flop slap of her feet on the sand. She loves the crash, crash, crash of the ocean waves. And she loves the gentle shush, shush of the beach umbrella in the breeze. But a rainstorm hits and Bella’s perfect family beach day is ruined. This day is a rainy, awful mess! But maybe a little imagination, and a loving family, can show Bella that a beach day at home can be its own special kind of fun.

In frightening times, we wish the world could be otherwise. With a touch of imagination, it can be. Imagination helps us see what’s hidden, and it shape-shifts reality’s roiling twisting waves. In this inspiring reframe of a classic Buddhist teaching, Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes that the paramitas, or “six perfections” - generosity, ethical conduct, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and understanding - can help us reconfigure the world we live in.

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world.

In this companion volume to The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of human artistic achievement, examining painting, sculpture, architecture, theology, philosophy, history, poetry, drama, literature, dance, music, and film.

From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted - endangering American democracy and society as a whole. Yet in order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right.

This heartfelt adventure follows a young girl named Jane as she tries to navigate the challenge of feeling different in her own skin while experiencing bullying at school. Though she is soft-spoken and quirky on the outside, she struggles on the inside—desperately wanting to belong.

First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve.

When American sociologist C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination was first published in 1959, it provoked much hostile reaction. This was understandable: the book was a hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced - and on a number of leading sociologists. Mills was a fierce critic of both modern capitalism and Soviet-style authoritarianism, and argued that the sociology profession failed to look at how people's problems are connected to the structures of the society in which they live.

Kojo Koram traces the tale of how, after the end of the British empire, an interconnected group of well-heeled British intellectuals, politicians, accountants and lawyers offshored their capital, seized assets and saddled debt in former 'dependencies'. This enabled horrific inequality across the globe, as ruthless capitalists profited and ordinary people across Britain's former territories in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were trapped in poverty.

A controversial examination of the influence and presence of the Norse god Odin in contemporary history and culture.

From nineteenth-century abolitionism to Black Lives Matter today, progressive social movements have been at the forefront of social change. Yet it is seldom recognized that such movements have not only engaged in political action but also posed crucial philosophical questions about the meaning of justice and about how the demands of justice can be met. Michele Moody-Adams argues that anyone who is concerned with the theory or the practice of justice—or both—must ask what can be learned from social movements.

Congressman and Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Michael McCaul, has spent years in Washington watching the administration turn a blind eye to the most pressing possible threats to the country. Now, in Failures of Imagination, McCaul turns away from the over-sensationalized, unrealistic fears circulated through the media in order to expose the most legitimate and looming national security threats, which have long been swept under the rug by the administration.