Beacons of Liberty


Book Description

The fascinating story of how free African Americans and runaway slaves crossed international borders to fight for freedom and racial justice.




Beacons of Light


Book Description

FLASH... FLASH... FLASH...A lighthouse signals from the rocky shore, guiding ships away from danger. Once sailors watched for giant bonfires that were set high on hills. Now, most lighthouses are fully automated. In Beacons of Light: Lighthouses, Gail Gibbons tells all about these beautiful and useful structures, using careful explanations, colorful facts, and helpful illustrations to show how lighthouse technology has developed and changed over the years. FLASH... FLASH... FLASH... In this informative, delightfully evocative book, lighthouses are beacons of light thatremind us of our past.




The Narrow Corridor


Book Description

How does history end? -- The Red Queen -- Will to power -- Economics outside the corridor -- Allegory of good government -- The European scissors -- Mandate of Heaven -- Broken Red Queen -- Devil in the details -- What's the matter with Ferguson? -- The paper leviathan -- Wahhab's children -- Red Queen out of control -- Into the corridor -- Living with the leviathan.




Liberty Is Sweet


Book Description

A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.




Slavery & the Underground Railroad in New Hampshire


Book Description

New Hampshire was once a hotbed of abolitionist activity. But the state had its struggles with slavery, with Portsmouth serving as a slave-trade hub for New England. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers and Stephen Symonds Foster helped create a statewide antislavery movement. Abolitionists and freed slaves assisted in transporting escapees to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Author Michelle Arnosky Sherburne uncovers the truth about slavery, the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement in New Hampshire.




Freedom's Seekers


Book Description

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie's Freedom's Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas. Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive to those who sought but were not granted freedom, and those who resisted enslavement individually as well as collectively on behalf of their communities. He explores the many roles that fugitive slaves, slave soldiers, and slave rebels played in their own societies. He likewise explicates the lives of individual freedmen, freedwomen, and freed children to show how the first free-born generation helped to shape the terms and conditions of the post-slavery world. Freedom's Seekers is a signal contribution to African Diaspora studies, especially in its rigorous respect for the agency of those who sought and then fought for their freedom, and its consistent attention to the transnational dimensions of emancipation.




Harrington: 'The Commonwealth of Oceana' and 'A System of Politics'


Book Description

James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first theorist to interpret the English Civil Wars as a revolution, the result of a long-term process of social change which led to the decay of the old political order. The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) is a fictionalised presentation of English history up to the victory of the New Model Army, explaining the fall of the monarchy and proposing a republic to replace it. A System of Politics, written after the Restoration, is a scheme of history and political philosophy erected on the foundations of his previous works. Professor Pocock's introduction emphasises Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought. This edition also contains a chronology of events in Harrington's life and a guide to further reading.




T.M.C. Asser (1838-1913)


Book Description

This is the first research study on Tobias Asser, the Nobel Peace laureate, based on his personal files. It sheds new light on all aspects of Asser's imposing career and enlightens the dramatic interaction of the professional and private reaches.




America, Guns, and Freedom


Book Description

"Dr. Miguel Faria's journey into politics and the public health and gun control movements began when, as editor of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, he studied the problem of gun violence and discovered the gun research conducted by the medical establishment was not scientific research as claimed, but politicized, result-oriented propaganda designed to bolster the preordained conclusion that guns should be eradicated from the general population. Faria and three other experts testified before a congressional subcommittee, exposing the pseudoscience of the gun research conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDe and proposing the elimination of funds for such research. Congress agreed and passed the Dickey Amendment, restricting CDC gun research that advocates for gun control. Faria relates his adventures during his stint "within the belly" of the public health establishmentƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚€ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚" that is, his appointment by President George W. Bush as a member of a grant review committee at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPe of the CDC, the very institution he had criticized for nearly a decade! He criticizes some of the methodology used by the NCIPC and militates for a more rigorous scientific process for approval of grants in the area of injury prevention. He exposes specific flaws in several gun violence studies that attempted to link lawful gun ownership to violent crime. He argues that gun violence is not merely a consequence of "easy gun availability," but due to the cycle of government dependency, broken families, the failure of public education, and the cultural disintegration that has been taking place for decades, particularly in the poorer southern states, and for which the federal government welfare policies have been largely responsible. America, Guns, and Freedom outlines why the Second Amendment and armed self-defense are still needed in modern society, debunks the arguments that the U.S. should follow the path of European social democracies by enforcing draconian gun control, and expounds on how civilian disarmament in Australia and Great Britain, despite media hype, has not decreased violent crime in those countries. In America, Guns, and Freedom, the author warns us of the five essential ingredients required for the creation and sustenance of tyrannical governments, one of which has been civilian disarmament via gun registration followed by gun bans and confiscation. Faria discusses mass shooting incidents and the role of mental illness. Special attention is given to the problem of how media sensationalism may encourage deranged individuals and madmen to become mass shooters seeking celebrity status, even in death. While gun control advocates decry America's "gun culture," Faria informs us of the significant role that this "gun culture" played in saving England during World War II. American traditions have been and remain beacons of liberty, and this is most evident in America, Guns, and Freedom. Totalitarian governments that deny their citizens the right to keep and bear arms are a threat to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness."




A Citizen's Introduction to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution


Book Description

The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are the greatest statements of human liberty ever written. They are the highest achievement of our political tradition, powerful beacons to all who strive for liberty. Taken together, these documents represent the liberating principles that America seeks to conserve for itself and proclaim to the world.If we are to restore and preserve America's principles, the truths to which we are dedicated and the common ideas that constitute us as a people, we must first rediscover them, writes Matthew Spalding, director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation.And that demands that we rediscover the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.