“A robustly researched and smoothly written overview of the many challenges confronting our devotion to fossil fuels” from the author of Tar Sands (Quill & Quire). Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world’s most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion. In this provocative book, Andrew Nikiforuk, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, argues that what we need is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and truly human scale. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute “In his cautionary tale about the evils of oil . . . Nikiforuk makes his case for impending doom if we don’t mend our energy-spending ways.” —The Star “In this cogently argued book, Andrew Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor. Oil dependency, he writes, is a modern form of slavery—and it’s time for a global abolition movement.” —Taras Grescoe, author of Shanghai Grand “A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty.” —Ronald Wright, author of On Fiji Islands

To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1972, The Energy of Slaves is Cohen's fifth collection, and one of his most controversial. A dark and intense book, described by one critic as "deliberately ugly, offensive, bitter, anti-romantic," Cohen considered it a document of his struggle—"I've just written a book called The Energy of Slaves," he told an interviewer at the time, "and in there I say that I'm in pain." Bracing, challenging, and equally beautiful and off-putting, it remains one of his most compelling and complex works.

Uses letters, newspaper articles, biographies, and autobiographies to tell the Underground Railroad's stories of pain and courage.

"And, just to put the icing on the cake, the radical freed slave organization, the Audubon Ballroom, is also on the scene - led by its notorious and ruthless assassin, Jeremy X."--BOOK JACKET.

Cover -- Contents -- Series Editor's Foreword -- Prologue -- 1 Networkers -- 2 Watermen -- 3 Domestics -- 4 Makers -- 5 Railroaders -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Essay on Sources -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "'I'm portable. My mind travels / the verse and valleys of whole people' says the poet. Correct! Readers of this book will discover their own memories. They will melt in them, amazed, lullabied, dramatized, shocked that they exist. Amy King is a true bard"--Tomaz Salamun.

In Art & Energy, Barry Lord argues that human creativity is deeply linked to the resources available on Earth for our survival. From our ancient mastery of fire through our exploitation of coal, oil, and gas, to the development of today's renewable energy sources, each new source of energy fundamentally transforms our art and culture—how we interact with the world, organize our communities, communicate and conceive of and assign value to art. By analyzing art, artists, and museums across eras and continents, Lord demonstrates how our cultural values and artistic expression are formed by our efforts to access and control the energy sources that make these cultures possible.

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST | WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE. A landmark history—the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early twentieth century. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. “The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue...In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Résendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.” — Literary Hub, 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade ““One of the most profound contributions to North American history.”—Los Angeles Times

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.