"Rosa Parks: A Life in American History explores the life of this important civil rights activist in the context of the cultural and social history of her time."--

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, a twenty-six-year-old Harvard writing instructor named Henry Sheahan volunteered with the American Field Service in France. After serving as an ambulance driver on the western front (and witnessing the horrific battle of Verdun), Sheahan, now going by the pen name Henry Beston, began to write children's stories (his fairy tales were immensely popular with the children of his Harvard classmate and close friend...

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...

Nelson Mandela is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has opened his personal archive, which offers an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life and offers a unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early...

Walker Evans's haunting images of Southern sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were as revolutionary in their time as James Agee's text, and are now deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. In the first full biography of this intriguing and enigmatic artist, a leading authority on Evans looks beyond the anonymity of his work to reveal the obsessions behind it.

"A deeply moving memoir about two lives that were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future. Five months pregnant, on a flight to their "babymoon," Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange, and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave--a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident--had suffered a rare and life-threatening...

In this poignant memoir of personal transformation, Jill Soloway takes us on a patriarchy-toppling emotional and professional journey. When Jill's parent came out as transgender, Jill pushed through the male-dominated landscape of Hollywood to create the groundbreaking and award-winning Amazon TV series Transparent. Exploring identity, love, sexuality, and the blurring of boundaries through the dynamics of a complicated and profoundly resonant American...

A decade ago, Special Forces warrior Jason Morgan parachuted into the Central American jungle on an anti-narcotics raid. Months later, he regained consciousness in a US military hospital, with no memory of how he'd gotten there-- and a prognosis that he would never walk again. After multiple surgeries and numerous setbacks, Morgan was a single father confined to a wheelchair and tortured by his pain. Light came in the form of Napal, the black Labrador...

Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) rose from modest means as the son of a peddler to immense wealth at the helm of Sears, Roebuck. Yet his most defining legacy stands not upon his business acumen but on the pioneering changes he introduced to the practice of philanthropy. While few may recall Rosenwald's name--he refused to have it attached to the buildings, projects, or endowments he supported--his passionate support of Jewish and African American causes...

"A gripping memoir from a BC Vancouver Sun journalist who was born to a West African mother, and then adopted as a small boy and raised by a white evangelical family. This is his searing account of being raised by fundamentalists. He grows up as a black kid who had his racial identity mocked and derided all the while being made to participate in the religious fervor of his mother's holy roller church. The religious brainwashing is of course dislocating...