Main content

History and geography

  • Author:
    Faubert, Marsha
    Summary:

    What does it mean to be exiled? For the landmarks of your past to disappear? In 1943, Wanda Gizmunt was ripped from her family home in Poland and deported to a forced labour camp in Nazi Germany. At the end of the war, she became one of millions of displaced Europeans awaiting resettlement. Unwilling to return to then-Soviet-occupied Poland, Wanda became one of 100 young Polish women brought to Canada in 1947 to address a labour shortage at a Quebec textile mill. But rather than arriving to long-awaited freedom, the women found themselves captives to their Canadian employer. Their treatment eventually became a national controversy, prompting scrutiny of Canada's utilitarian immigration policy. Wanda seized the opportunity to leave the mill in the midst of a strike in 1948. She never looked back, but she remained silent about her wartime experience. Only after her death did her daughter-in-law assemble the pieces of Wanda's life in Poland, Nazi Germany, and finally, Canada. In this masterful account of a hidden episode of history, Faubert chronicles the tragedy of exile and the meaning of silence for those whose traumas were never fully recognized.

  • Author:
    Drouillard, Staci Lola
    Summary:

    Staci Lola Drouillard guides listeners through the story of a once vibrant, now vanished off-reservation Ojibwe village. The author gives an authentic voice to the history of the Minnesotan North Shore.

  • Author:
    Cunningham, Michael H.
    Summary:

    Que Son Valley is actually a large area of hills and valleys just to the west of Da Nang, Viet Nam. During the 1960s, units from the United States Marines and United States Army engaged the 2nd North Vietnamese Division in heavy and close combat. Our mission was to keep the enemy from capturing the cities of Da Nang, Tam Ky and Chu Lai and to pacify the area. We did prevent the enemy from capturing these vital cities, but the area was far from pacified. Many young, brave Americans were killed or seriously wounded in these hills and valleys in the belief they were helping the Vietnamese obtain freedom and peace. Although our altruistic beliefs might have gone astray, it was my honor serving with these fine men and women. I wrote this book in honor of them and to keep their memory alive.

  • Author:
    Eversmann, Matt, Mooney, Chris, Patterson, James
    Summary:

    A powerful collection of never-before-told war stories crafted from hundreds of interviews by James Patterson and First Sergeant US Army (Ret.) Matt Eversmann.

  • Author:
    Ethari, Lamees Al
    Summary:

    In this memoir, Lamees Al Ethari traces her transition from an idyllic childhood in a large extended Iraqi family to the relative stability of family exilic life in Canada. Through memory fragments, clips of poetry, diary entries, and her own art, the author reveals the trauma of three senseless wars, a decade of dehumanizing sanctions on an innocent population, the blindness of a dictatorship to the suffering of its own people, and finally their resilience and the humanity they manage to preserve.

  • Author:
    Joseph, Peniel E.
    Summary:

    An acclaimed chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, Peniel Joseph presents this sweeping overview of a key component of the struggle for racial equality--the Black Power movement. This is the story of the men and women who sacrificed so much to begin a more vocal and radical push for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

  • Author:
    Ross, Alex
    Summary:

    This program is read by the author, and includes excerpts from Richard Wagner's musical compositions throughout. A New York Times Notable Books of 2020 Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now . In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  • Author:
    Ronald, John
    Summary:

    Ce conte pour enfant retrace le départ d'une fusée «  L'explorateur 8  » en direction sur la Lune. Un petit garçon, Pierre, écoute la radio qui diffuse cet événement, puis rêve d'aller sur la Lune... Au cours de ce rêve il rencontre un homme, Taylor, qui le prend pour le capitaine de la fusée, et Pierre peut poser toutes les questions qu'il souhaite... Une petite leçon d'histoire passionnante, dans laquelle on peut écouter des scènes historiques rejouées, pour revivre plus intensément ces avancées historiques.

  • Author:
    Conkling, Winifred
    Summary:

    On August 18, 1920, American women finally won the right to vote. Ratification of the 19th Amendment was the culmination of an almost eighty-year fight in which some of the fiercest, most passionate women in history marched, protested, and sometimes broke the law in to achieve this huge leap toward equal rights. In this expansive yet personal volume, author Winifred Conkling covers not only the suffragists' achievements and politics but also the private journeys that fueled their passion and led them to become women's champions. From Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who founded the suffrage movement at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention; to Victoria Woodhull, the first female candidate for president; to Sojourner Truth and her famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman'"; to Alice Paul, who was arrested and force-fed in prison, Conkling combines thorough research with page-turning storytelling to bring the battle for the right to vote to vivid life. Votes for Women! also explores the movement's often powerful, sometimes difficult relationship with the temperance and abolition movements, and takes unflinching look at some of the uglier moments in the fight for the women's vote. Votes for Women! is a mesmerizing read perfect for fans of propulsive narrative nonfiction stories like Most Dangerous and The Family Romanov. Author bio: Winifred Conkling is the award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction for young readers, including Radioactive!: How Irene Curie and Lise Meitner Revolutionized Science and Changed the World', Passenger on the Pearl: The True Story of Emily Edmonson's Flight from Slavery and the middle-grade novel Sylvia and Aki, winner of the Jane Addams Children's Literature Award and the Tomas Rivera Award. She studied journalism at Northwestern University and received an MFA in writing for children and young adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

  • Author:
    Frazer, Coral Celeste
    Summary:

    August 18, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited states and the US government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. This book reveals how the seventy-year-long fight for women's suffrage was hard-won by leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, and others. It demonstrates how their success led to the civil rights and feminist movements of the mid- and late- twentieth century, as well as today's #MeToo, #YesAllWomen, and Black Lives Matter movements. In the face of voter ID laws, voter purges, gerrymandering, and other restrictions, Americans continue to fight for equality in voting rights.

  • Author:
    Quigley, Gene
    Summary:

    Personal narratives in the veterans' own words help bring history to life. "I remember being in Holland just before Christmas... The officer stood up and asked the Germans to surrender, and they shot him right on the spot... Eventually, we made our way to the farmhouse, and a parcel had arrived addressed to this man who had just been killed. It was from his wife... We opened it up and there was a small note there. 'My Dear Darling, here is something to keep you nice and warm.' Here was a sweater she had knitted." - Harv Dewey

  • Author:
    Rains, Olga, Rains, Lloyd, Jarratt, Melynda
    Summary:

    Voices of the Left Behind contains the personal stories of nearly 50 Canadian war children who have been helped by Project Roots. It is filled with fascinating archival images and documents as well as original wartime correspondence between the mothers, the Canadian fathers, and the Department of National Defence, Veterans Affairs, and other Canadian institutions. Letters from the war children to the Military Personnel Records Unit of the National Archives of Canada illustrate the historic pattern of denial. What these institutions all have in common is their consistent refusal to help war children find their Canadian fathers. Introductory essays frame the subject and give a historical context to the tragic situations these women and their children found themselves in.

  • Author:
    Northup, Solomon
    Summary:

    Four of the most important and enduring American slave narratives together in one volume. Until slavery was abolished in 1865, millions of men, women, and children toiled under a system that stripped them of their freedom and their humanity. Much has been written about this shameful era of American history, but few books speak with as much power as the narratives written by those who experienced slavery firsthand. The basis for the film of the same name, Twelve Years a Slave is Solomon Northup's heartrending chronicle of injustice and brutality. Northup was born and raised a freeman in New York State-until he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. Before returning to his family and freedom, he suffered smallpox, the overseer's lash, and an attempted lynching. Perhaps the most famous of all slave chronicles, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass immediately struck a chord with readers when it was first released in 1855. After escaping to freedom, Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist, drawing on his own experiences to condemn the evils of slavery. One of the few female slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was originally published under a pseudonym by Harriet Jacobs. After she escaped to freedom in North Carolina, where she became an abolitionist, Jacobs described the particular suffering of female slaves, including sexual harassment and abuse. Published in 1850, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is Truth's landmark memoir of her life as a slave in upstate New York and her transformation into a pioneer for racial equality and women's rights. These narratives serve as a timeless testament to the strength and bravery, and as a voice to the millions of people enslaved in this dark period of American history. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

  • Author:
    Arnove, Anthony, Zinn, Howard
    Summary:

    Here are selected testimonies to living history--speeches, letters, poems, songs--offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. New voices featured in this tenth anniversary edition include Chelsea Manning, Naomi Klein, a member of Dream Defenders, members of the Undocumented Youth movement, a member of the Day Laborers movement, and several critics of the Obama administration.

  • Author:
    Budd, Robert, Vickers, Roy Henry
    Summary:

    The Skeena, second longest river in the province, remains an icon of British Columbia's northwest. Called Xsien ("water of the clouds") by the Tsimshian and Gitksan, it has always played a vital role in the lives of Indigenous people of the region. Since the 1800s, it has also become home to gold seekers, traders, salmon fishers and other settlers who were drawn by the area's beauty and abundant natural resources. Voices from the Skeena will take readers on a journey inspired directly by the people who lived there. Combining forty illustrations with text selected from the pioneer interviews CBC radio producer Imbert Orchard recorded in the 1960s, the book follows the arrival of the Europeans and the introduction of the fur trade to the Omineca gold rush and the building of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Open the pages to meet Robert Cunningham, an Anglican missionary who would later become the founder of the thriving Port Essington. Here too is a man called Cataline, a packer for whom no settlement was too remote to reach, and the indominable Sarah Glassey, the first woman to pre-empt land in British Columbia. At the heart of these stories is the river, weaving together a narrative of a people and their culture. Pairing the stories with Roy Henry Vickers's vibrant art creates a unique and captivating portrait of British Columbia that will appeal to art lovers and history readers alike.

  • Author:
    Posluns, Michael, Seeger, Pete
    Summary:

    On April 23, 1990, after a five-week journey from Hudson Bay to the Hudson River, the Odeyak landed at the Battery for Earth Day. Half-Cree, half-Inuit, the 24-foot freighter canoe, plowing across the Manhattan seascape, was a strange small vessel build in the dark Arctic winter to carry a message from two First Nations of the northern wilderness to a reclaiming of Times Square for Mother Earth. Along with the Crees’ and the Inuit’s hopes and fears for their children and for the future of their river, the Odeyak carried a simple request. The Great Whale Hydroelectric Project, the first part of James Bay II, will destroy the natural economy of the Great Whale region, killing the way of life the Crees and the Inuit have followed since time immemorial. It came to ask the people of New England and New York not to buy the power.

  • Author:
    Drabek, Jan
    Summary:

    In 1939 the botanist Vladimir Krajina joined the Czech Resistance and quickly became one of its leaders. Incredible escapes from the Gestapo followed while some 20,000 radio messages were sent by his group to London, among them those about the pending invasion of the Balkans and of the Soviet Union. As the strongest anti-Communist Party’s general secretary he escaped from the country on skis after the Communist takeover. Personally thanked for his wartime effort by Winston Churchill, Krajina came to the University of British Columbia where as a professor of botany he battled the forest barons and their practice of clear-cutting and slash burning. He then turned his attention to saving pristine areas of the province, earning the title of father of the Ecological Reserve Program, since replicated throughout Canada. As a Companion of the Order of Canada, he returned triumphantly to Prague in 1990 to receive the Order of the White Lion, the highest Czechoslovak award, from President Vaclav Havel. Krajina died peacefully in Vancouver in 1992 as one of those happy individuals who had achieved practically everything they had set out to do in life.

  • Author:
    Peers, Laura, Brown, Alison K.
    Summary:

    In 2010, five magnificent Blackfoot shirts, now owned by the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, were brought to Alberta to be exhibited at the Glenbow Museum, in Calgary, and the Galt Museum, in Lethbridge. The shirts had not returned to Blackfoot territory since 1841, when officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company acquired them. The shirts were later transported to England, where they had remained ever since. Exhibiting the shirts at the museums was, however, only one part of the project undertaken by Laura Peers and Alison Brown. Prior to the installation of the exhibits, groups of Blackfoot people—hundreds altogether—participated in special “handling sessions,” in which they were able to touch the shirts and examine them up close. The shirts, some painted with mineral pigments and adorned with porcupine quillwork, others decorated with locks of human and horse hair, took the breath away of those who saw, smelled, and touched them. Long-dormant memories were awakened, and many of the participants described a powerful sense of connection and familiarity with the shirts, which still house the spirit of the ancestors who wore them. In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of an effort to build a bridge between museums and source communities, in hopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships between the two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. Negotiating the tension between a museum’s institutional protocol and Blackfoot cultural protocol was challenging, but the experience described both by the authors and by Blackfoot contributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserve objects for posterity. Visiting With the Ancestorsdemonstrates that the emotional and spiritual power of objects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. For Blackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one that evokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot cultural heritage.

  • Author:
    Allende, Isabel
    Summary:

    Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics.

  • Author:
    Cayli, Baris
    Summary:

    How do militants rationalize violence and what are their motives? How do time and space shape their destiny? In Violence and Militants Baris Cayli explores these enduring questions by comparing violent episodes in towns and villages in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans with today's zones of conflict from Afghanistan to the Middle East. Placing history alongside the troubles of the present, Violence and Militants reveals parallels between Christian militants who rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and four jihadist organizations of today: Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Isis. Drawing on scholarship by political theorists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, Cayli traces the root of dissent to a perceived deprivation that leads to aggressive protest and action. He argues that the rationalization of violence functions independently of time and geographical location. Through a riveting narrative, this book uncovers how militant groups use revenge, ideals, and confrontation to generate fear and terror in the name of justice. Breaking new ground, Violence and Militants is the first book to address this complex relationship across different periods of history.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - History and geography