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  Battle of Edgehill The: The...

  Editors Charles River

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  The outcome of the English Civil War was no doubt unthinkable to many across Europe before it actually happened, and the Battle of Edgehill represented the first sign that things might not go according to the typical plan. The tiny hamlet of Edgehill sits atop an escarpment in the parish of Ratley and Upton in Warwickshire, England, an unremarkable location in and of itself, like many others in Warwickshire. It attracts a few tourists, some of whom are on the lookout for ghosts. Some claim to hear cries of pain and terror, the clash of swords, cannon fire, and the lament of lost souls. The first report of such phenomena was made shortly before Christmas 1642 when a number of Edgehill inhabitants claimed to have seen two ghostly armies fighting in the sky. So strong and widespread did these claims become that King Charles I sent a commission to investigate. The commissioners supposedly witnessed the apparitions and were able to identify some of the combatants as participants in the Battle of Edgehill, which occurred three months earlier on October 23, 1642. This included Sir Edmund Verney, who lost a hand in the battle and was observed missing an appendage. The apparitions supposedly ended when villagers buried the corpses of soldiers who still lay on the battlefield, but people still claim to hear signs of the celestial battle 370 years later. 
  The enormous upheaval in English society in 1642 may very well have engendered such tales. For the simple villagers, it seemed as if heaven and earth had been rent asunder. After all, the whole concept of divinely ordained kings was that God had created the system and placed a king over England, making the monarch, Charles I of the House of Stuart, God’s viceregent. But that year, the unthinkable happened when the king and Parliament broke with each other, raising their standards of war. The divinely appointed order was broken, and the result was bloodshed, terror, and chaos.

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  Symposium

  Plato

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  The Symposium by Plato is a philosophical dialogue that explores the various facets of love and its role in the attainment of higher truth. Through a series of speeches given by the characters, Plato's work provides an illuminating examination of eros and its potential as an agent for personal transformation. The text serves as an exploration into the nature of human emotion, offering insight into how one might pursue a meaningful life through cultivating intimate relationships with others. Read in English, unabridged.

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  Radical Equations - Civil Rights...

  Robert P. Moses, Jr. Charles E....

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  At a time when popular solutions to the educational plight of poor children of color are imposed from the outside, the acclaimed Algebra Project and its founder, Robert Moses, offer a vision of school reform based in the power of communities. Founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship in society, the Project works with entire communities—parents, teachers, and especially students—to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity. 
   
   
   
  Telling the story of this remarkable program, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize: "Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don't want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don't want." 
   
   
   
  We see the Algebra Project organizing community by community. Older kids serve as coaches for younger students and build a self-sustained tradition of leadership. And we see the remarkable success stories of schools like the predominately poor Hart School in Bessemer, Alabama, which outscored the city's middle-class flagship school in just three years.

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  The FBI War on Tupac Shakur -...

  John Potash

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  Since the first day after the tragedy was announced, controversy has surrounded the death of rap and cultural icon Tupac Shakur. In this work, preeminent researcher on the topic, John Potash, puts forward his own theories of the events leading up to and following the murder in this meticulously researched and exhaustive account of the story. Never before has there been such a detailed and shocking analysis of the untimely death of one of the greatest musicians of the modern era. The FBI War on Tupac Shakur contains a wealth of names, dates, and events detailing the use of unscrupulous tactics by the Federal Bureau of Investigation against a generation of leftist political leaders and musicians. Based on twelve years of research and including extensive footnotes, sources include over 100 interviews, FOIA-released CIA and FBI documents, court transcripts, and mainstream media outlets. Beginning with the birth of the Civil Rights Movement in America, Potash illustrates the ways in which the FBI and the United States government conspired to take down and dismantle the various burgeoning activist and revolutionary groups forming at the time. From Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X to Fred Hampton, the methods used to thwart their progress can be seen repeated again and again in the 80s and 90s against later revolutionary groups, musicians, and, most notably, Tupac Shakur. Buckle up for this winding, shocking, and unbelievable tale as John Potash reveals the dark underbelly of our government and their treatment of some of our most beloved Black icons.

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  Abraham - The First Jew

  Anthony Julius

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  The story of Abraham, the first Jew, portrayed as two lives lived by one person, paralleling the contradictions in Judaism throughout its history 
   
   
    
  In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism's foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham's life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people. 
   
   
    
  Abraham's first life is an early adulthood of questioning the polytheism of his home city of Ur Kasdim until its ruler, Nimrod, condemns him to death and he is rescued, he believes, by a miracle. In his second life, Abraham's focus is no longer on critique but rather on conversion and on his leadership over his growing household, until God's command that he sacrifice his son Isaac. This test, the Akedah (or "Binding"), ends with another miracle, as he believes, but as Julius argues, it is also a catastrophe for Abraham. The Akedah represents for him an unsurpassed horizon—and in Jewish life thereafter. This book focuses on Abraham as leader of the first Jewish project, Judaism, and the unresolvable, insurmountable crisis that the Akedah represents—both in his leadership and in Judaism itself.

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  The Making of Black Lives Matter...

  Christopher J. Lebron

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  Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and incendiary campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that "Black Lives Matter" comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity—and not just equal rights—of black people. 
   
   
   
  In this updated edition, The Making of Black Lives Matter presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and expands on the movement's relevancy. This edition includes a new introduction that explores how the movement's core ideas have been challenged, re-affirmed, and re-imagined during the white nationalism of the Trump years, as well as a new chapter that examines the ideas and importance of Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka as significant participants in the Black Power Movement and Black Arts Movement, respectively. Drawing on the work of Davis, Baraka, and other revolutionary black public intellectuals, Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law enforcement.

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