Reverend John Rankin is credited with providing safety through the Underground Railroad to more than 2,000 people as they tried to escape slavery. Not as well-known as Harriet Tubman's story to most readers, Beacon to Freedom recounts in an illlustrated, nonfiction narrative how Rankin guided runaways across the wide Ohio River with a light in his window, giving them hope in a time of great fear and danger.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth 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 four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

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

A renowned anthropologist explores the history and meaning of eating in America. Addressing issues ranging from the global phenomenon of Coca-Cola to the diets of American slaves, Sidney Mintz shows how our choices about food are shaped by a vast and increasingly complex global economy. He demonstrates that our food choices have enormous and often surprising significance.

The faith of a people in their greater destiny has been a propelling force of considerable power in the history of the world. In it s more perfect form, this ideal has spurred on the American people to their own higher good and, at the same time, been an inspiration for good on the efforts of others as well. By the end of the eighteenth century, Americans were firmly committed to the belief that the fate of freedom here was to determine the fate of freedom everywhere. And in the nineteenth century, the American destiny to lead the world out of ignorance and misery and onto the high plateaus of human happiness was not only accepted in American but was welcomed with hosannas by innumerable Europeans. This volume studies the impact of American destiny on Great Britain in the middle years of the nineteenth century—a period during which an uneasy struggle for power and place was engulfing the masses of the people, the new industrial middle class, and the conservative defenders of the old landed regime. This book seeks to trace American influence by determining what English people of varied station and opinion thought about the American democracy and how their ideas about American became drawn into and influenced their own experiences. Here is the real American destiny.

Describes the history and creation of the Statue of Liberty and how it came to be a symbol of the United States.

Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives. This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia. Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution.

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MLK’s classic account of the first successful large-scale act of nonviolent resistance in America: the Montgomery bus boycott. A young Dr. King wrote Stride Toward Freedom just 2 years after the successful completion of the boycott. In his memoir about the event, he tells the stories that informed his radical political thinking before, during, and after the boycott—from first witnessing economic injustice as a teenager and watching his parents experience discrimination to his decision to begin working with the NAACP. Throughout, he demonstrates how activism and leadership can come from any experience at any age. Comprehensive and intimate, Stride Toward Freedom emphasizes the collective nature of the movement and includes King’s experiences learning from other activists working on the boycott, including Mrs. Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin. It traces the phenomenal journey of a community and shows how the 28-year-old Dr. King, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transform the nation and the world. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped one of them at random.

Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.