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History and Current Events August 2025 |
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The Roma : a traveling history by Madeline Potter"The word Roma conjures images of free-spirited nomads, creative and easy-going people who choose to eschew social conformity for personal independence and a life on the road. Few know these people's long, tortuous history of being harassed, expelled, deported, demonized, enslaved, and murdered. The Roma is a fascinating history of this people observed from within their world that moves away from stereotypes and the tragedy that has defined them. While Madeline Potter does not overlook the deeply held racism and oppression they have endured, she instead celebrates the Roma's strength and endurance, their ability to resist and survive. Blending memoir and archival research, her sweeping, heartfelt traveling history moves across Europe, from Tudor England to Romania where she was born and raised; from sixteenth-century Spain to modern Sweden; from Nazi Austria to twenty-first-century France to uncover the interwoven stories and struggles of Romani communities past and present, and what the future may hold for both nomadic, and settled, families on the continent"
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The road that made America : a modern pilgrim's journey on the Great Wagon Road
by James Dodson
"Little known today, the Great Wagon Road was the primary road of frontier America: a mass migration route that stretched more than eight hundred miles from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia. It opened the Southern frontier and wilderness east of the Appalachian Mountains to America's first settlers, and later served as the gateway for the exploration of the American West. In the mid-1700s, waves of European colonists in search of land for new homes left Pennsylvania to settle in the colonial backcountry of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. More than one hundred thousand settlers made the arduous trek, those who would become the foundational generations of the world's first true immigrant nation. In their newly formed village squares, democracy took root and bloomed. During the Revolutionary War, the road served as the key supply line to the American resistance in the western areas of the colonies, especially in the South. Drawing on years of fieldwork and scholarship by an army of archeologists, academics, archivists, preservationists, and passionate history lovers, James Dodson sets out to follow the road's original path from Philadelphia to Georgia. On his journey, he crosses six contiguous states and some of the most historic and hallowed landscapes of eastern America, touching many of the nation's most sacred battlefields and burying grounds. Due to its strategic importance, military engagements were staged along the Great Wagon Road throughout North America's three major wars, including the early days of the bloody French and Indian conflict and pivotal Revolutionary War encounters. In time, the Great Wagon Road became America's first technology highway, as growing roadside villages and towns and cities became, in effect, the first incubators of America's early Industrial age. The people and ideas that traveled down the road shaped the character of the fledgling nation and helped define who we are today. Dodson's ancestors on both sides took the Great Wagon Road to Maryland and North Carolina, respectively, giving him a personal stake in uncovering the road's buried legacy. An illuminating and entertaining first-person history, The Road That Made America restores this long-forgotten route to its rightful place in our national story"
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The beast in the clouds : the Roosevelt brothers' deadly quest to find the mythical giant panda
by Nathalia Holt
"The Himalayas--a snowcapped mountain range that hides treacherous glacier crossings, raiders poised to attack unsuspecting travelers, and air so thin that even seasoned explorers die of oxygen deprivation. Yet among the dangers lies one of the most beautiful and fragile ecosystems in the world. During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology. Along the way, the Roosevelt expedition faced an incredible series of hardships as they disappeared in a blizzard, were attacked by robbers, overcome by sickness and disease, and lost their food supply in the mountains. The explorers would emerge transformed, although not everyone would survive. Beast in the Clouds brings alive these extraordinary events in a potent nonfiction thriller featuring the indomitable Roosevelt family. From the soaring beauty of the Tibetan plateau to the somber depths of human struggle, Nathalia Holt brings her signature 'immersive, evocative' (Bookreporter) voice to this astonishing tale of adventure, harrowing defeat, and dazzling success"
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| Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the... by Scott EllsworthAward-winning historian Scott Ellsworth's compelling and well-researched latest focuses on the final year of the American Civil War, revealing how John Wilkes Booth may have been part of a long-planned Confederate conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Further reading: Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War by Michael Vorenberg. |
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| The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature by Charlie EnglishFormer Guardian journalist Charlie English evocatively chronicles the CIA's successful efforts to weaken Soviet censorship and control by distributing subversive and pro-democracy literature to Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Try this next: The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minoui. |
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| Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan GreenwellIn her incisive debut, journalist Megan Greenwell draws upon her own experience as a former writer for Deadspin to investigate the damaging impact private equity firms have on American workers and communities. Further reading: These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. |
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| Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights... by Sam KeanBestselling science writer Sam Kean (The Icepick Surgeon) offers a lively chronicle of how experimental archeologists utilize evidence found at dig sites to replicate ancient rituals and customs, including hunting with period-appropriate weaponry, playing an Aztec ballgame, brewing ancient Egyptian beer, and even mummifying corpses. Further reading: Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Avon Lake Public Library
32649 Electric Blvd.
Avon Lake, Ohio 44012
440-933-8128alpl.org |
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