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History and Current Events March 2020
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Breaking hate : confronting the new culture of extremism
by Christian Picciolini
A former leader of white-supremacist skinheads who now works as a peace activist discusses how average Americans can push back against the forces trying to polarize and radicalize us and end the normalization of extremism.
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Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases
by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, editors
What it is: an incisive collection of essays commemorating the centennial of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Topics include: immigration; intellectual freedom; racial discrimination.
What sets it apart: Well-known writers including Marlon James, Neil Gaiman, Jacqueline Woodson, Charlie Jane Anders, and Salman Rushdie offer insights and personal connections to some of the organization's most hard-fought battles.
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Franchise : the golden arches in black America
by Marcia Chatelain
Traces the lesser-known history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America, revealing how unexpected collaborations among franchises, black capitalists and civil rights leaders provided effective economic responses to racial inequality.
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A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism
by Caroline Moorehead
What it's about: how a group of anti-fascist women in Italy's Piedmont region spearheaded the country's resistance efforts after Mussolini's fall in 1943, navigating a treacherous web of Nazi invaders, Italian fascists, and mistrustful Allies.
Read it for: a portrait of four heroic women eager to shake off the social norms of a system that preferred them to be passive.
Series alert: A House in the Mountains is the moving conclusion to the bestselling World War II-themed Resistance Quartet.
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Natural rivals : John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the creation of America's public lands
by John Clayton
Although many people today think of public lands as an American birthright, their very existence was then in doubt, and dependent on a merger of the talents of these two men. Natural Rivals examines a time of environmental threat and political dysfunction not unlike our own, and reveals the complex dynamic that gave birth to America's rich public lands legacy.
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The Boston Massacre : a family history
by Serena R. Zabin
A “people’s history” of the event that helped trigger the American Revolution draws on original sources and lively stories to recount the personal and political conflicts that led to the 1770 shooting of locals by British soldiers.
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Math makers : the lives and works of 50 famous mathematicians
by Alfred S Posamentier
Chronicles the history of mathematics through biographies of 50 mathematicians, including Isaac Newton, who founded classical physics and infinitesimal calculus and Sophie Germain, who secretly studied math at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, using the name of a male student.
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Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by David Zucchino
What it's about: the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, when white supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina stoked racist ire to overthrow the city's mixed-race government and disenfranchise thousands of black citizens, killing an estimated 60 black people.
Why you should read it: Drawing upon numerous primary sources including diaries and witness testimonies, Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino's sobering and resonant history rightly corrects the historical record -- for decades, the coup was viewed as a race riot instigated by Wilmington's black population.
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Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's...
by Diane Ravitch
What it is: an impassioned, well-researched analysis of how the school privatization movement fails students and teachers, and how grassroots efforts are leading the charge to prioritize America's public schools.
Author alert: Historian Diane Ravitch is the former U.S. assistant secretary of education and the author of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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