"Many prominent and well-known figures greatly impacted the civil rights movement, but one of the most influential and unsung leaders of that period was Gloria Richardson. As the leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), a multifaceted liberation campaign formed to target segregation and racial inequality in Cambridge, Maryland, Richardson advocated for economic justice and tactics beyond nonviolent demonstrations. Her philosophies...

Featured in multiple "must-read" lists, No One Tells You This is "sharp, intimate...A funny, frank, and fearless memoir...and a refreshing view of the possibilities—and pitfalls—personal freedom can offer modern women" (Kirkus Reviews).
If the story doesn't end with marriage or a child, what then? This question plagued Glynnis MacNicol on the eve of her fortieth birthday....

The legend of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator has grown to mythic proportions. But what if almost everything you knew about Lincoln were false? What if, instead of an American hero who sought to free the slaves, Lincoln were in fact a calculating politician who waged the bloodiest war in American history in order to build an empire? Here, through extensive research and meticulous documentation, DiLorenzo portrays Lincoln as a man who devoted...

From the Publisher: Fifty years after she made history by refusing to give up her seat on a bus, Rosa Parks at last gets the major biography she deserves. The eminent historian Douglas Brinkley follows this thoughtful and devout woman from her childhood in Jim Crow Alabama through her early involvement in the NAACP to her epochal moment of courage and her afterlife as a beloved (and resented) icon of the civil rights movement. Well researched and...

Growing up as the child of former sharecroppers in a segregated Baltimore, Elijah Cummings saw firsthand how injustice could run rampant, even in a democracy that promises fairness and equality. But with a strong support system and fiery self-discipline, Elijah utilized the momentum of the civil rights movement to overcome the obstacles of poverty and racism to effect change at a time when our country so badly needed it. In We're Better Than This,...

Ben Barres was known for his groundbreaking scientific work and for his groundbreaking advocacy for gender equality in science. In this book, completed shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in December 2017, Barres (born Barbara Barres in 1954) describes a life full of remarkable accomplishments-from his childhood as a precocious math and science whiz to his experiences as a female student at MIT in the 1970s to his female-to-male transition...

John Brown is a lightning rod of history. Yet he is poorly understood and most commonly described in stereotypes as a madman, martyr, or enigma. But this work shows the sacrifices he made for his ideals, relevant today defining the line between activism and terrorism. He was committed to absolute racial equality. His friendships were African Americans in defiance of the culture around him, his family (twenty children) he turned into a dedicated...

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African...

Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists,...