Download or read book Shooting Victoria written by Paul Thomas Murphy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During her long reign, Queen Victoria was the target of no fewer than eight assassination attempts. In seven of these cases her life was saved by poor marksmanship or misfiring weaponry, but one assailant managed to strike her with a finely wrought cane. Remarkably, all eight of her attackers lived to tell their tales, and were variously incarcerated in asylums, deported to Australia, or in a few cases eventually released into society again. Paul Thomas Murphy shows how these obscure would-be assassins effected a change in history. Their attacks on Victoria galvanised her to face them down by presenting a more public face than her forebears, thereby laying the groundwork for the monarchy as we know it today. SHOOTING VICTORIA opens up a new window onto Victorian England. In exploring contemporary attitudes to madness, crime and criminality, it reveals a wealth of little-known and often surprising aspects of 19th-century British society and monarchy.

Download or read book A Mother s Reckoning written by Sue Klebold and published by Crown Publishing Group (NY). This book was released on 2016 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The mother of one of the two shooters at Columbine High School draws on personal recollections, journal entries and video recordings to piece together what led to her son's unpredicted breakdown and share insights into how other families might recognize warning signs,"--NoveList.

Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

Download or read book Sandy Hook written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carnegie Medal Nonfiction Longlist 2023 The Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022 Publishers Weekly Best Books 2022 Kirkus Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022 Slate Best Books 2022 Chicago Tribune Best Books 2022 Los Angeles Times Best Books 2022 Based on hundreds of hours of research, interviews, and access to exclusive sources and materials, Sandy Hook is Elizabeth Williamson’s landmark investigation of the aftermath of a school shooting, the work of Sandy Hook parents who fought to defend themselves, and the truth of their children’s fate against the frenzied distortions of online deniers and conspiracy theorists. On December 14, 2012, a gunman killed twenty first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Ten years later, Sandy Hook has become a foundational story of how false conspiracy narratives and malicious misinformation have gained traction in society. One of the nation’s most devastating mass shootings, Sandy Hook was used to create destructive and painful myths. Driven by ideology or profit, or for no sound reason at all, some people insisted it never occurred, or was staged by the federal government as a pretext for seizing Americans’ firearms. They tormented the victims’ relatives online, accosted them on the street and at memorial events, accusing them of faking their loved ones’ murders. Some family members have been stalked and forced into hiding. A gun was fired into the home of one parent. Present at the creation of this terrible crusade was Alex Jones’s Infowars, a far-right outlet that aired noxious Sandy Hook theories to millions and raised money for the conspiracy theorists’ quest to “prove” the shooting didn’t happen. Enabled by Facebook, YouTube, and other social media companies’ failure to curb harmful content, the conspiracists’ questions grew into suspicion, suspicion grew into demands for more proof, and unanswered demands turned into rage. This pattern of denial and attack would come to characterize some Americans’ response to almost every major event, from mass shootings to the coronavirus pandemic to the 2020 presidential election, in which President Trump’s false claims of a rigged result prompted the January 6, 2021, assault on a bastion of democracy, the U.S. Capitol. The Sandy Hook families, led by the father of the youngest victim, refused to accept this. Sandy Hook is the story of their battle to preserve their loved ones’ legacies even in the face of threats to their own lives. Through exhaustive reporting, narrative storytelling, and intimate portraits, Sandy Hook is the definitive book on one of the most shocking cultural ruptures of the internet era.

Download or read book Shooting Midnight Cowboy written by Glenn Frankel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Much more than a page-turner. It’s the first essential work of cultural history of the new decade." —Charles Kaiser, The Guardian One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Publishers Weekly best book of 2021 The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and New York Times–bestselling author of the behind-the-scenes explorations of the classic American Westerns High Noon and The Searchers now reveals the history of the controversial 1969 Oscar-winning film that signaled a dramatic shift in American popular culture. Director John Schlesinger’s Darling was nominated for five Academy Awards, and introduced the world to the transcendently talented Julie Christie. Suddenly the toast of Hollywood, Schlesinger used his newfound clout to film an expensive, Panavision adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. Expectations were huge, making the movie’s complete critical and commercial failure even more devastating, and Schlesinger suddenly found himself persona non grata in the Hollywood circles he had hoped to conquer. Given his recent travails, Schlesinger’s next project seemed doubly daring, bordering on foolish. James Leo Herlihy’s novel Midnight Cowboy, about a Texas hustler trying to survive on the mean streets of 1960’s New York, was dark and transgressive. Perhaps something about the book’s unsparing portrait of cultural alienation resonated with him. His decision to film it began one of the unlikelier convergences in cinematic history, centered around a city that seemed, at first glance, as unwelcoming as Herlihy’s novel itself. Glenn Frankel’s Shooting Midnight Cowboy tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. The film’s boundary-pushing subject matter—homosexuality, prostitution, sexual assault—earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969. For Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger—who had never made a film in the United States—enlisted Jerome Hellman, a producer coming off his own recent flop and smarting from a failed marriage, and Waldo Salt, a formerly blacklisted screenwriter with a tortured past. The decision to shoot on location in New York, at a time when the city was approaching its gritty nadir, backfired when a sanitation strike filled Manhattan with garbage fires and fears of dysentery. Much more than a history of Schlesinger’s film, Shooting Midnight Cowboy is an arresting glimpse into the world from which it emerged: a troubled city that nurtured the talents and ambitions of the pioneering Polish cinematographer Adam Holender and legendary casting director Marion Dougherty, who discovered both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight and supported them for the roles of “Ratso” Rizzo and Joe Buck—leading to one of the most intensely moving joint performances ever to appear on screen. We follow Herlihy himself as he moves from the experimental confines of Black Mountain College to the theatres of Broadway, influenced by close relationships with Tennessee Williams and Anaïs Nin, and yet unable to find lasting literary success. By turns madcap and serious, and enriched by interviews with Hoffman, Voight, and others, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic is not only the definitive account of the film that unleashed a new wave of innovation in American cinema, but also the story of a country—and an industry—beginning to break free from decades of cultural and sexual repression.

Download or read book Chicago s Reckoning written by John Hagan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West side predominantly Black neighborhoods where police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wilson's tortured confession to two police killings. This case coincided with RM Daley's pursuit of White votes in an early and unsuccessful primary campaign for mayor. Suspicions about Daley's connection to Wilson's confession lasted throughout his career. As State's Attorney, Daley mobilized a massive assault on "gangs, guns, and drugs" by tightening law enforcement methods. An example involved the Automatic Transfer Act used to prosecute 15 year-old Joseph White in adult court for shooting a fellow student. The judge thought White should have sought help from police, but he and his family knew the police as brutal occupiers of local neighborhoods. White was sentenced to 45 years in a maximum-security prison. Jon Burge was finally convicted in 2010-of perjury-but he served only three years, while many of his victims remained on death row. In a sidebar in the Burge trial-unheard by jurors-the judge refused to allow evidence about a racialized code of silence that concealed Burge's torture. Our book ends by explaining how Daley and Burge escaped meaningful punishment through the code of silence and out of court settlements. These remain unrelenting sources of the racial reckoning confronting this quintessential American city"--

Download or read book Empire of Guns written by Priya Satia and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade "A fascinating and important glimpse into how violence fueled the industrial revolution, Priya Satia's book stuns with deep scholarship and sparkling prose."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain's most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society's pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state's heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain's near-constant state of war. Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control and the "military-industrial complex" -- that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia's eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it. Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history -- a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.

Download or read book The Saddest Words William Faulkner s Civil War written by Michael Gorra and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “timely and essential” (New York Times Book Review) reconsideration of William Faulkner’s life and legacy that vitally asks, “How should we read Faulkner today?” With this “rich, complex, and eloquent” (Drew Gilpin Faust, Atlantic) work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Gorra charts the evolution of an author through his most cherished—and contested—novels. Given the undeniable echoes of “Lost Cause” romanticism in William Faulkner’s fiction, as well as his depiction of Black characters and Black speech, Gorra argues convincingly that Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Upending previous critical traditions and interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, the widely acclaimed The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

Download or read book New English Canaan of Thomas Morton written by Thomas Morton and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Torture Letters written by Laurence Ralph and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

Download or read book How to Be a Young Antiracist written by Ibram X. Kendi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults! Based on the adult bestseller by Ibram X. Kendi, and co-authored by bestselling author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist will serve as a guide for teens seeking a way forward in acknowledging, identifying, and dismantling racism and injustice. The New York Times bestseller How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi is shaping the way a generation thinks about race and racism. How to be a (Young) Antiracist is a dynamic reframing of the concepts shared in the adult book, with young adulthood front and center. Aimed at readers 12 and up, and co-authored by award-winning children's book author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist empowers teen readers to help create a more just society. Antiracism is a journey--and now young adults will have a map to carve their own path. Kendi and Stone have revised this work to provide anecdotes and data that speaks directly to the experiences and concerns of younger readers, encouraging them to think critically and build a more equitable world in doing so.

Download or read book A Slaveholder s Daughter written by Belle Kearney and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The New Sultan written by Soner Çaǧaptay and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a world of rising tensions between Russia and the United States, the Middle East and Europe, Sunnis and Shiites, Islamism and liberalism, Turkey is at the epicentre. And at the heart of Turkey is its right-wing populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. Since 2002, Erdo?an has consolidated his hold on domestic politics while using military and diplomatic means to solidify Turkey as a regional power. His crackdown has been brutal and consistent - scores of journalists arrested, academics officially banned from leaving the country, university deans fired and many of the highest-ranking military officers arrested. In some senses, the nefarious and failed 2016 coup has given Erdo?an the licence to make good on his repeated promise to bring order and stability under a 'strongman'. Here, leading Turkish expert Soner Cagaptay will look at Erdo?an's roots in Turkish history, what he believes in and how he has cemented his rule, as well as what this means for the world. The book will also unpick the 'threats' Erdogan has worked to combat - from the liberal Turks to the Gulen movement, from coup plotters to Kurdish nationalists - all of which have culminated in the crisis of modern Turkey."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Download or read book The Cold War s Killing Fields written by Paul Thomas Chamberlin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant young historian offers a vital, comprehensive international military history of the Cold War in which he views the decade-long superpower struggles as one of the three great conflicts of the twentieth century alongside the two World Wars, and reveals how bloody the "Long Peace" actually was. In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history. A superb work of scholarship illustrated with four maps, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is the first global military history of this superpower conflict and the first full accounting of its devastating impact. More than previous armed conflicts, the wars of the post-1945 era ravaged civilians across vast stretches of territory, from Korea and Vietnam to Bangladesh and Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon. Chamberlin provides an understanding of this sweeping history from the ground up and offers a moving portrait of human suffering, capturing the voices of those who experienced the brutal warfare. Chamberlin reframes this era in global history and explores in detail the numerous battles fought to prevent nuclear war, bolster the strategic hegemony of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and determine the fate of societies throughout the Third World.

Download or read book King Leopold s Ghost written by Adam Hochschild and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

Download or read book The Quincunx written by Charles Palliser and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1990-11-27 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Download or read book Colonial Phantoms written by Dixa Ramírez and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—miscategorized or erased—the Dominican Republic since the nineteenth century despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. Through a variety of Dominican cultural texts, from literature to public monuments to musical performance, it illuminates the Dominican quest for legibility and resistance.