True Stories from History and Biography

True Stories from History and Biography PDF Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description

True Stories from History and Biography

True Stories from History and Biography PDF Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Black Church

The Black Church PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984880330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

True Stories from History and Biography (Classic Reprint)

True Stories from History and Biography (Classic Reprint) PDF Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780260049155
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Get Book Here

Book Description
Excerpt from True Stories From History and Biography Grandfather again shoves his great Chair before the youthful public, and desires to make them acquainted with a new dynasty of occupants. The iron race of Puritans, whose rigid figures sat bolt upright against its oaken back, in the first Epoch of our History, have now given place to quite a different set of men. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

History, Historians, and Autobiography

History, Historians, and Autobiography PDF Author: Jeremy D. Popkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226675432
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives PDF Author: Diane Johnson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
A classic of alternative biography and feminist writing, this empathetic and witty book gives due to a "lesser" figure of history, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who was brilliant, unconventional, and at odds with the constraints of Victorian life. “Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the table—a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage.” So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to one of those “lesser lives.” As the author points out, “A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one.” Such sympathy and curiosity compelled Diane Johnson to research Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821–1861), the daughter of the famous artist Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) and first wife of the equally famous poet George Meredith (1828–1909). Her life, treated perfunctorily and prudishly in biographies of Peacock or Meredith, is here exquisitely and unhurriedly given its due. What emerges is the portrait of a brilliant, well-educated woman, raised unconventionally by her father only to feel more forcefully the constraints of the Victorian era. First published in 1972, Lesser Lives has been a key text for feminists and biographers alike, a book that reimagined what biography might be, both in terms of subject and style. Biographies of other “lesser” lives have since followed in its footsteps, but few have the wit, elegance, and empathy of Johnson’s seminal work.

John Brown, 1800-1859

John Brown, 1800-1859 PDF Author: Oswald Garrison Villard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 816

Get Book Here

Book Description
The present volume is inspired by a belief that fifty years after the Harper's Ferry tragedy, the time is ripe for a study of John Brown, free from bias, from the errors in taste and fact of the mere panegyrist, and from the blind prejudice of those who can see in John Brown nothing but a criminal. The pages that follow were written to detract from or champion no man or set of men, but to put forth the essential truths of history as far as ascertainable, and to judge Brown, his followers and associates in the light thereof. -- Adapted from the preface.

Augustine's Confessions

Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838029
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine’s Confessions In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills's biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic.

Personal History

Personal History PDF Author: Katharine Graham
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1474610269
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 720

Get Book Here

Book Description
As seen in the new movie The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep, here is the captivating, inside story of the woman who piloted the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media. In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story - one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candour and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband - a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman's union as she entered the profane boys' club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted - and mastered - the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.

The Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis PDF Author: Ronald Hendel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
During its 2,500-year life, the book of Genesis has been the keystone to important claims about God and humanity in Judaism and Christianity, and it plays a central role in contemporary debates about science, politics, and human rights. The authors provide a panoramic history of this iconic book, exploring its impact on Western religion, philosophy, literature, art, and more.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson PDF Author: Jacqueline Goggin
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807121843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Born in rural Virginia during Reconstruction, Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was a central figure in black history and an important American scholar. In 1912, he became the first and only individual of slave parentage to earn a Ph.D. in history. In 1915 he founded the Association for the Study of Negro (now African-American) Life and History, and he devoted the remainder of his life to the study and advancement of the history of his race. His legacy of achievement extends to the present day. In preparing this detailed biography of Woodson, the first book-length treatment of his life, Jacqueline Goggin conducted extensive research in archival sources throughout the country. From a paucity of primary materials, she provides as complete an account as possible of Woodson’s humble upbringing and early influences. She also describes his education at Berea College, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University, and his early career as a teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C., an experience that deepened his belief in the uplifting power of education for blacks. Drawing upon Woodson’s own writings, correspondence from a wide range of collections, and numerous secondary sources, the author delineates Woodson’s work both within and outside the ASNLH, as well as his contributions to the interpretation of American history. Woodson maintained that knowledge of Negro history would inculcate blacks with a sense of self-esteem and alleviate white racism, and he initiated a series of educational programs and publications directed toward black and white intellectuals as well as the mass of African Americans. He edited the Journal of Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin and wrote many influential books, notably The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 and The Negro in Our History. Through his research and writing, he challenged prevailing stereotypes about blacks and established black history as a legitimate field of inquiry, enduring all the while the patronizing attitudes of many white historians, educators, and philanthropists, on whom he relied for always-scarce funding. Woodson also used his scholarship to influence the policies of black social welfare and protest organizations such as the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the more radical Friends of Negro Freedom. W. E. B. Du Bois said of Woodson that he “kept to one goal, and worked at it stubbornly and with unwavering application and died knowing that he accomplished much if not all that he planned.” This important intellectual biography reveals the complex and dedicated individual Woodson was and the lasting significance of his pioneering work in black history.