I've Got the Light of Freedom


Book Description

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men--sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers--committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.




Pen


Book Description

One hundred years of protecting freedom of expression-literature knows no frontiers. This book tells the extraordinary story of how writers from around the world placed the celebration of literature and the defense of free speech at the center of humanity's struggle against repression and terror.




America


Book Description

America The Story of Us is a groundbreaking series that brings to life the epic story of our nation in a new way for a new generation. The companion book, America The Story of Us is a history that is at once penetrating and lively, elegant and authoritative; great for serious reading as it is for casual skimming. America The Story of Us brings to life the vast forces that shaped this remarkable country and the ways in which revolutions in technology and transportation altered the way Americans lived, made money, and fought one another. Explored in these pages is the struggle between settlers and Native Americans; the epic conflict of slavery, from cotton gin to Civil War; the creation of the transcontinental railroad alongside the thundering herds of buffalo across the West; and how American ingenuity and determination both carried us through the Great Depression and won the Second World War. Beginning with Jamestown and Plymouth Bay, the first successful British colonies on the mainland, the book highlights the landmark moments in political, social, economic, and military history, from the prototypical entrepreneur John Rolfe and his tobacco seeds to Barack Obama and the seeds of change, from the Model T to the moon landing. Written by novelist, historian, and journalist Kevin Baker (a key contributor to The American Century, by Harold Evans), the narrative shares the TV series- eye for the dramatic moment in U.S. history-there is danger, action, struggle-while adding new layers of detail and nuance. America The Story of Us is decisive and essential, the story of the country that every family will want to own. Foreword by President Obama A stunning companion piece for the most anticipated HISTORY broadcast of all time, includes 412 heavily illustrated pages featuring over 300 full color images and layers of information including "charticles,” graphics, photographs, and text. The adventure that became a nation - the complete history of the US has not been told for 40 years. AMERICA the Story of Us is an exuberant, unprecedented look at the invention of America focusing on how events small and large are intrinsically linked to the exploration and innovation, leading us from the frontier to 21st century cities, from the Mississippi to the moon, from Jamestown to 9/11 up to present day. Moving though time and space linking key events, people and locations, capturing the vast sweep of American history-- bringing viewers on a journey through the forces that shaped the destiny of America.




Freedom's Frontier


Book Description

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.




The Illustrated History of the Freedom Struggle


Book Description

A Stunning Visual Record Of India&Rsquo;S Struggle For Independence This Elegant Volume Attempts To Chronicle For The First Time Ever, The Visual Moments Of The Movement That Changed The History Of India. The Culmination Of Over A Hundred Years Of Striving That Had Claimed Thousands Of Lives, The Indian Freedom Movement Was A Struggle Marked By Remarkable Leadership, Personal Integrity And Terrible Sacrifice. It Was The First Nonviolent Mass Movement That Overthrew An Empire. With A Thought-Provoking Introduction By Pavan K. Varma, Who Enumerates The Enduring Legacies Of The Freedom Movement, This Book Is Replete With Photographs, Maps, Newspaper Clippings And Letters Sourced From Various Archives, Museums And Libraries From India And Abroad. The Richly Illustrated Pages Take You From The Decades Prior To The Revolt Of 1857 To The Independence Of India On 15 August 1947 And To The Formation Of The Republic Of India. It Is At Once An Introduction To The Subject For The Lay Reader And A Companion To The Volumes Of Written History On The Struggle That We All Know So Well.&Nbsp; The Illustrated History Of The Freedom Struggle Is A Must Have For Anyone Who Believes That When It Comes To Chronicling The Epochal Events Of A Nation&Rsquo;S History, A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words.




Crossroads of Freedom


Book Description

The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 6,000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day, and twice the number killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. In Crossroads of Freedom, America's most eminent Civil War historian, James M. McPherson, paints a masterful account of this pivotal battle, the events that led up to it, and its aftermath. As McPherson shows, by September 1862 the survival of the United States was in doubt. The Union had suffered a string of defeats, and Robert E. Lee's army was in Maryland, poised to threaten Washington. The British government was openly talking of recognizing the Confederacy and brokering a peace between North and South. Northern armies and voters were demoralized. And Lincoln had shelved his proposed edict of emancipation months before, waiting for a victory that had not come--that some thought would never come. Both Confederate and Union troops knew the war was at a crossroads, that they were marching toward a decisive battle. It came along the ridges and in the woods and cornfields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River. Valor, misjudgment, and astonishing coincidence all played a role in the outcome. McPherson vividly describes a day of savage fighting in locales that became forever famous--The Cornfield, the Dunkard Church, the West Woods, and Bloody Lane. Lee's battered army escaped to fight another day, but Antietam was a critical victory for the Union. It restored morale in the North and kept Lincoln's party in control of Congress. It crushed Confederate hopes of British intervention. And it freed Lincoln to deliver the Emancipation Proclamation, which instantly changed the character of the war. McPherson brilliantly weaves these strands of diplomatic, political, and military history into a compact, swift-moving narrative that shows why America's bloodiest day is, indeed, a turning point in our history.




The Chicago Freedom Movement


Book Description

Six months after the Selma to Montgomery marches and just weeks after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a group from Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff arrived in Chicago, eager to apply his nonviolent approach to social change in a northern city. Once there, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the locally based Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) to form the Chicago Freedom Movement. The open housing demonstrations they organized eventually resulted in a controversial agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley and other city leaders, the fallout of which has historically led some to conclude that the movement was largely ineffective. In this important volume, an eminent team of scholars and activists offer an alternative assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement's impact on race relations and social justice, both in the city and across the nation. Building upon recent works, the contributors reexamine the movement and illuminate its lasting contributions in order to challenge conventional perceptions that have underestimated its impressive legacy.




Freedom


Book Description

Explores the history of freedom and the battle to uphold the freedom in America.




Freedom Farmers


Book Description

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.