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History and Current Events May 2025 |
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Gettysburg : the tide turns
by Bruce Chadwick
In late June of 1863, one month after his victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee, head of the Army of Northern Virginia, invaded the North. He would cross the Potomac River and head towards Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with the goal of seizing the trains which would then take his army into Philadelphia and perhaps even New York City. He hoped that these victories would force U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to surrender.
Chadwick provides an in-depth oral history of the Gettysburg battle, combining firsthand accounts and historical narrative to depict the pivotal clash that halted Lee's Northern advance, questioned his tactics, elevated Meade's leadership and inspired Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
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Children of radium : a buried inheritance
by Joe Dunthorne
This extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.
Siegfried Merzbacher was a chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection and was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz.
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From the reservation to Washington : the rise of Charles Curtis
by Debra Goodrich
The first person of color to serve as vice president, Charles Curtis was once a household name but has become a footnote in American history. As a mixed-race person, he was constantly forced to choose whether to be Indian or white. Society would not let him be both. When his temper flared it was his "savage nature" coming through; when he presided over the United States Senate with an unprecedented knowledge of the rules and procedures, it was evidence of his "civilized" ancestry. Private and pragmatic, he became a respected statesman championing citizenship for Native Americans and rights for women. But his path of inclusion was perceived by others as destroying tribal sovereignty.
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Valley of forgetting : Alzheimer's families and the search for a cure
by Jennie Erin Smith
In the 1980s, a neurologist named Francisco Lopera traveled on horseback into the mountains seeking families with symptoms of dementia. For centuries, residents of certain villages near Medellín had suffered memory loss as they reached middle age, going on to die in their fifties. Lopera discovered that a unique genetic mutation was causing their rare hereditary form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Over the next forty years of working with the “paisa mutation” kindred, he went on to build a world-class research program
Valley of forgetting explores the scientific breakthroughs, personal sacrifices, and ethical complexities of a groundbreaking quest to understand and potentially prevent the disease.
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| Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children by Noliwe RooksAward-winning scholar of education and Black history Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data and cultural history to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. She tells the story of her grandparents, who were among the thousands of Black teachers fired following the Brown decision; her father, who was traumatized by his experiences at an almost exclusively-white school; her own experiences moving from a flourishing, racially diverse school to an underserved inner-city one; and finally her son and his Black peers, who over half-century after Brown still struggle with hostility and prejudice from white teachers and students alike. She also shows how present-day discrimination lawsuits directly stem from the mistakes made during integration. |
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Medicine River : a story of survival and the legacy of Indian boarding schools
by Mary Annette Pember
From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their tribal communities to attend boarding schools whose stated aim was to "save the Indian" by way of assimilation. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the U.S. government, but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were a calculated attempt to dismantle tribes by pulling apart Native families. Children were beaten for speaking their Native languages; denied food, clothing, and comfort; and forced to work menial jobs in terrible conditions, all while utterly deprived of love and affection.
Amongst those thousands of children was Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother, who was was sent to a boarding school at age five. The trauma of her experience cast a pall over Pember's own childhood and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark but hopeful portrait of communities still reckoning with the trauma.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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