Specific Person

We live in an age of displacement. Refugee numbers are increasing due to a proliferation of fragile states. And yet, rising populist nationalism has undermined the political willingness of rich countries to accept migrants and asylum seekers. Given these contradictory trends, how can we create sustainable refugee policies that enable displaced people to live in safety and dignity, while operating at scale? The Wealth of Refugees draws upon a decade of original qualitative and quantitative research to offer practical solutions.

Drawing on archeological and ethno-historical evidence, Irving Rouse sketches a picture of the Tainos-the first people Columbus encountered when he arrived in the Americas-as they existed during the time of Columbus, contrasting their customs with those of their neighbors. He then moves backward in time to the ancestors of the Tainos-two successive groups who settled the West Indies and who are known to archeologists as the Saladoid peoples and the Ostionoid peoples.

Three months into her pregnancy with her first child, Hilary Yancey received a phone call that changed everything. As she learned the diagnosis - cleft lip and palate, a missing right eye, possible breathing complications - Hilary began to pray in earnest. Even in the midst of these findings, she prayed that God would heal her son. God could do a miracle unlike anything she had seen. Only when Hilary held her baby, Jack, in her arms for the first time did she realize God had given her something drastically different than what she had demanded.

They put a price on his head. They did everything they could to disrupt his mission. Finally, when an antitank mine tore off his right foot, the warriors of jihad in Iraq thought they had neutralized one of their most resourceful, determined foes.

Winston Churchill, Andy Warhol, Tom Cruise, Agatha Christie, and Pablo Picasso were all famous and successful in their chosen professions. And they were all dyslexic. But what is dyslexia? Are there different types of dyslexia? Is there a cure? This guide answers these and other questions, providing a concise explanation of the causes and symptoms of dyslexia, a learning disorder that inhibits the reading and writing ability of millions of children and adults worldwide.

In Trust the Dog, the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation introduces listeners to a group of extraordinary people who, thanks to their guide dogs, flourish in a world that assumes the ability to see. Among them are a brother and sister who lost their sight at a very young age and whose dogs essentially helped them grow up, a Serbian girl who fled civil war to find new hope in America, and a newly blind single father determined to keep his family together against all odds.

When her daughters are born deaf, Rosner is stunned. Then she discovers a hidden history of deafness in her family, going back generations to the Jewish enclaves of Eastern Europe. Traveling back in time, she imagines her silent relatives, who showed surprising creativity in dealing with a world that preferred to ignore them. Rosner shares her journey into the modern world of deafness, and the controversial decisions she and her husband have made about hearing aids, cochlear implants, and sign language.

We’ve all had moments of feeling like we didn’t belong, but imagine being born into a world where fitting in was never an option. Michele Sullivan, who has a rare form of dwarfism, shares how her physical posture taught her the most effective relational posture with others, which helped her become one of the most powerful women in philanthropy.

The past 60 years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana.

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people - two-thirds black and one-third white - held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day - the peak of the movement - Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington.

Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker have fascinated the world since the 19th century. In her captivating book, Chang and Eng Reconnected, Cynthia Wu traces the "Original Siamese Twins" through the terrain of American culture, showing how their inseparability underscored tensions between individuality and collectivity in the American popular imagination.

The first significant book on the history and impact of the ADA - the "eyes on the prize" moment for disability rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the widest-ranging and most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation ever passed in the United States, and it has become the model for disability-based laws around the world. Yet the surprising story behind how the bill came to be is little known.

Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature". More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered 21 children between them. More than a biography of the twins, this is a study of 19th-century American culture and society that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.

In 1959, at the age of 21, Max Starkloff was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His doctors doubted he would live longer than a few days, and, if he survived, the hope for his quality of life would be minimal. How did this young man with barely a high school education become the leader of a powerful disability rights movement and the founder of the Starkloff Disability Institute? This is his remarkable story.

While "freaks" have captivated our imagination since well before the 19th century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, "missing links", and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of "consolidation" for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of "freakery".

Hoy en día en Estados Unidos hay más de quinientas naciones indígenas reconocidas por el Gobierno federal que comprenden casi tres millones de personas, descendientes de los quince millones de nativos que habitaban esas tierras. El programa genocida que los colonos desarrollaron durante siglos ha sido omitido, en gran medida, de la historia, pero, ahora, por primera vez, la historiadora y activista Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz nos ofrece una historia de Estados Unidos contada desde la perspectiva de los pueblos indígenas.

American Founders reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. The multitude of events and mixed-race individuals included in the book underscores that black and white Americans share the same history, and in many cases, the same ancestry. American Founders is meant to celebrate this shared heritage and strengthen these bonds.

Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through 10 case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among individuals born blind, along with the everyday epistemology of vision. Kaschak's work reveals not only how the blind create systems of meaning out of cultural norms but also how cultural norms inform our conscious and unconscious interactions with others regardless of our physical ability to see. She exposes gender, race, and sexual orientation as unconscious and pre-verbal in the sighted, an aspect of implicit bias.

With the raging culture war, the underlying "race war" is rarely addressed in a more reasoned way. Roderick Edwards, author of many taboo-challenging books, takes on the controversial topic of what part other White people played in colonization and slavery. The Other White People is a detailed look into the history and contributions of peoples such as the Vikings and the Russians: White people who did not participate in the colonization of the Americas nor the Atlantic slave trade of Africans.

Jarret Ruminski examines ordinary lives in Confederate-controlled Mississippi, to show how military occupation and the ravages of war tested the meaning of loyalty during America's greatest rift. This study focuses on wartime activities - such as swearing the Union oath, illegally trading with the Union army, and deserting from the Confederate army - to show how Mississippians acted on multiple loyalties to self, family, and nation. It probes the relationship between race and loyalty, to indicate how an internal war defined Mississippi's social development, well into the 20th century.