The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism. From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences. In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Monsters are here to stay.--Christopher James Blythe "Journal of Religion and Popular Culture"

Out of nowhere, yet everywhere, came the response, "Not everyone can," on the thought, the inspiration, and a personal calling to write the story. John Kazyaka experienced many hardships growing up in Detroit, foiling a kidnapping, surviving Catholic school, and attending a Jesuit-style retreat. Raised in a dysfunctional home, he learned to live a better life albeit anger issues prevailed. By his faith in God, he learned to endure and to cancel the prejudiced thoughts and violent behavior passed down by prior generations. Giving allegiance to the "Holy Name Society," he began to process a bridling of the tongue to avoid the bar of soap. That was a promise he kept because Lifebuoy soap tasted terrible. As John unfolds his story from childhood through the Vietnam experience in the book Tell Them They Are Mine: A Personal Journey with Christ, he hopes you will discover salvation and appreciate the love of God He has for the earth and those who live here and that the story is inspirational

Lea Carson can't believe it when her family moves into the creepy old house on Fear Street. Most creepy of all is the secret room in the attic, which has been boarded up for 100 years. Lea thinks she hears footsteps inside. Should she open the door?

“Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America.”—Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. “A full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review “A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”—The Atlantic “Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.”—The Wall Street Journal “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—The Boston Globe

Frightening dreams night after night are afflicting the chief of pediatrics, Adam Stafford, at Ocala Regional Medical Center. Will there be a conclusion of his dreams or will he succumb to a death spiral before he can awake? At ORMC, Adam attempts to understand why deathbed children on the pediatric floor at ORMC awakened cured without any medical explanation? In a near-by town, an archeologist, Lisa Douglas, is searching for the meaning of ancient hieroglyphs on various Mayan relics recently discovered in a cave along Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. There seems to be a possibility that all these scenarios are intertwined with a twelve-year-old male patient, Arius Turner, at Ocala Regional Medical Center.

"The Legend of John Wilkes Booth is a story of how collective memories and popular histories collide with, clash, and sometimes overcome mainstream accounts of the past. It offers an alternate venue for studying the workings of Civil War memory in American culture and demonstrates how (and why) culture produced at the grassroots level can challenge the official version of events."--BOOK JACKET.