You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison” (Jane Kamensky, professor of American history at Harvard University). Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their ki...
None
First Published in 1968. This volume is a collection of the Gunning Lectures made at Divinity Hall, Edinburgh University in 1925. The aim of the lectures has been to present the origin of Islam against a background of surrounding Christainity.
In the early 1800s John Bell moved his family from North Carolina to the rich bottom lands along the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee. Bell, an elder in the Red River Baptist Church, was well-liked and respected by most in the community and prospered as a farmer. As Bell worked hard to raise his family and to carve out a living, the unusual, unexpected, and terrifying happened. Between 1817 and 1821 the Bell family were allegedly tormented day and night by some heinous menacing spirit called a "witch" known as "Kate." Kate's remonstrations and activities were witnessed by many in the community. The events eventually led to the death of John Bell, and he is the only person whose demise is attributed to the work of a spirit. Written only seventy-three years after the awful events transpired, this is the story of the Bell Witch. This is the eyewiteness account by a member of the Bell family.
From the Foreword: In this book, Mulcahy delivers a collection of captive narratives from the crew members who were part of this historic time in the history of national reconnaissance. Most of them were unaware of what was in the capsules they recovered, the true mission of the Discoverer program, and Discoverer's relationship with the classified Corona photosatellite reconnaissance program; however, they all understood the importance of their mission to recover capsules from space. The reader will have an opportunity to experience these missions through the perspective of those who served. I challenge you as you read these recollections to look for lessons in this part of the Corona program-lessons that you can apply to your future challenges. The Corona program tested the limits of technology, stretched the skills of those involved, and overcame disappointments along the way. The perseverance and resourcefulness of everyone involved, from the concept engineers to these air crews who caught "a falling star," demonstrates that the unimagined can become possible and challenges along the way can be overcome.
Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip. Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used slave suicide...
Buried Lives offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation. The historians and literary scholars included in this volume offer a complement and corrective to conventional understandings of incarceration that privilege the intentions of those in power over the experiences of prisoners. Considering such varied settings as jails, penitentiaries, almshouses, workhouses, floating prison ships, and plantations, the contributors reconstruct the struggles of people im...