John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened—once with lynching—and consistently subjected to racism's denigration of his humanity. Yet he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution, Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of Chicago's history department and, later, John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history is understood and taught and become one of the world's most celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But Franklin's participation was much more fundamental than that. From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President's Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation's racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall's preparation for arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory, Mirror to America chronicles Franklin's life and this nation's racial transformation in the twentieth century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of color.

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Collection of essays which define the Negro's role in American history from Colonial times to the present

The chronological compilation of Letters to the Editor presented in ESPYLACOPA covers twenty-five years of opinions from the author published by various newspapers across America and Europe. The observations within ESPYLACOPA reflect the progressively relevancy of Muslim insight into the development of political, social and spiritual trends in America. As Islam continues to be more relevant in America in the days and years to come, the message offered in this little book may serve as a welcomed gift of enlightenment to those readers who seek a fuller understanding of Islam and Muslims and choose to prepare for the beginning of the journey into an inheritable tomorrow. The viewpoints offered in ESPYLACOPA by a Muslim born and raised in Mississippi and who is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force are intended to promote social justice and spiritual enhancement and shine a light on the path into the future as the relationship between Islam and the Americas becomes more intertwined and amicable, inshallah (God willing).

Tocqueville opens the Recollections, his deeply ambivalent memoir of the failed 1848 Revolution in France, with an explicit denial of any literary intent or rhetorical appeal. Forced by illness into an unaccustomed state of leisure, Tocqueville claims to record his experiences solely for his own amusement, holding up a "secret mirror" through which he will be able to contemplate the past truthfully. In this innovative study, L. E. Shiner examines the Recollections as a test case of the relation between form and content in historical writing. Drawing on current literary theory and semiotics, Shiner offers a close reading which at once confirms the inevitably literary character of historical writing and demonstrates how rhetorical analysis of Tocqueville's writings deepens our understanding of his political thought. Using the methods of reader-response and rhetorical criticisms, among others, Shiner first analyzes the component genres and narrative structures of the Recollections, the recurring pictorial and thematic codes, and the various voices Tocqueville employs. He then confronts the issue of the truth of Tocqueville's treatment of 1848, in part by comparing it with other key texts on these same events—Marx's The Class Struggles in France and Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Finally, Shiner pursues questions of authorial style, tracing the use of some of the rhetorical devices discussed in the Recollections through Tocqueville's Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, and "A Fortnight in the Wilderness."

As a counterpart to research on the 1930s that has focused on liberal and radical writers calling for social revolution, David Welky offers this eloquent study of how mainstream print culture shaped and disseminated a message affirming conservative middle-class values and assuring its readers that holding to these values would get them through hard times. Through analysis of the era's most popular newspaper stories, magazines, and books, Welky examines how voices both outside and within the media debated the purposes of literature and the meaning of cultural literacy in a mass democracy. He presents lively discussions of such topics as the newspaper treatment of the Lindbergh kidnapping, issues of race in coverage of the 1936 Olympic games, domestic dynamics and gender politics in cartoons and magazines, Superman's evolution from a radical outsider to a spokesman for the people, and the popular consumption of such novels as the Ellery Queen mysteries, Gone with the Wind, and The Good Earth. Through these close readings, Welky uncovers the subtle relationship between the messages that mainstream media strategically crafted and those that their target audience wished to hear.

During the 1990s, many members of the House of Representatives could be characterized as citizen legislators - they either voluntarily limited their term in office or they had no prior political experience. Representing America compares the representational styles of these legislators with the professional legislators, who make a career out of being a legislator, elected at the time.