Other books that might interest you

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  American Visions - The United...

  Edward L. Ayers

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  A revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today. 
   
   
   
  The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. 
   
   
   
  Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.

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  The Self - A Very Short...

  Marya Schechtman

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  'Know thyself' is said to have been one of the maxims carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. On the face of it, this does not seem like a very difficult task. My self is with me at every moment of every day, I have access to its inner thoughts and feelings, and I am hardly liable to mistake someone else for me. At the same time, however, the self is surprisingly elusive and opaque. Our understanding of the self is replete with puzzles and paradoxes: I cannot be anyone but who I am, and yet everyone will acknowledge that there are circumstances in which being oneself is a difficult task. If I change enough, I can be said to have become a different person. I cannot get away from myself, and yet I can find and lose myself. 
   
   
   
  In this Very Short Introduction, Marya Schechtman uses insights from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and popular thought to consider some of the most compelling and puzzling questions about the self, including questions about what kind of object a self is if it is an object at all, what it means to be oneself and why it is important, what kinds of changes the self can and cannot survive, whether a self can be separated from its body, whether more than one self can exist in a single body, and what role engagement with the environment and with other selves plays in constituting and maintaining the self.

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  Selling Social Justice - Why the...

  Jennifer C. Pan

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  The national racial reckoning that began in 2020 promised to radically restructure American society from the bottom up. But five years on, it has mainly served to strengthen the ruling class and deliver the rich an opportunity to rehabilitate a profoundly unequal economic order at a moment when the stability of the system and the public's trust in it are deteriorating. 
   
   
   
  Corporations have used antiracism to consolidate their political power and evade government regulation. Employers have surveilled and undermined workers through counterproductive diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings. Affluent professionals and Democratic politicians have exacerbated a stark class divide by pushing half-baked "racial equity" policies that come at the expense of the majority of working people. And the right has reacted to these developments by stoking a toxic culture war against "wokeness" that serves as a distraction from the increasing economic hardship faced by Americans of all races. 
   
   
   
  Selling Social Justice investigates the rise and spread of contemporary antiracist ideology and shows how the rich came to embrace this particular form of justice. In this provocative account, Jennifer C. Pan explores why, in a twenty-first-century economy of increasing scarcity, antiracism is the wrong frame for understanding and fighting inequality.

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  Windfall - Viola MacMillan and...

  Tim Falconer

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  The fascinating, scandalous, and true story of Viola MacMillan and the Windfall mining scandal
  		 
  Viola MacMillan had it all: success, money, and respect. Influence, even. But in 1964, after three decades in the mining industry, one of the most fascinating women in Canadian business history was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals.
  		 
  MacMillan, who started out as a prospector in the ’30s, had developed lucrative mines and put together big deals. But she still wanted “a major discovery.” Early in July 1964, shares in Windfall Oil and Mines, a company she and her husband controlled, traded for around 56 cents. Then one day, the stock took off. In the absence of any information from the company about what it had found near Timmins on its claims, rumors and greed pushed the share price to a high of $5.70. MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally, after three weeks, Windfall admitted it had nothing.
  		 
  So many small investors lost money when the stock crashed that the Ontario government appointed a royal commission to examine what had happened, which led to changes at the Ontario Securities Commission and the Toronto Stock Exchange. Although MacMillan spent a few weeks in prison, she later received a pardon and the Order of Canada.

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  Sumerian Civilization The: An...

  Enthralling History

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  How much do you know about the “cradle of civilization?” Come explore the legacy of the brilliant ancient Mesopotamians who transformed the world. 
  Ancient Mesopotamia’s legacy was truly revolutionary. Childlike pictures scratched into wet clay evolved into the first written language. The Mesopotamians wrote the first epic poems, the first hymns, the first histories, and the first law codes. They developed the first wheel for transportation; simple carts that hauled bricks or produce morphed into chariots racing along at thirty-five miles per hour. 
  They gazed at the sky and mapped it, observing the planets’ retrograde motions and predicting lunar and solar eclipses. They developed the concept of time, measurements, basic counting, higher math, and hydraulic engineering. 
  Mesopotamia gave birth to the world’s first great empires—the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Achaemenids—which stretched over three continents. 
  A glimpse at the questions this overview unpacks includes:How old is the world’s first city?How did the Eridu Genesis compare to Noah and the ark?How fast was the world’s first postal system?How many times did Babylon’s patron god Marduk get stolen?How did Hammurabi’s law code compare to the Law of Moses?Who calculated pi (π) to the value of 3.125 and understood the Pythagorean theorem twelve centuries before Pythagoras was born?Did Xerxes really have a million men in his army?Which empire encompassed 44 percent of the world’s population?What eunuch poisoned most of the Persian royal family?And much, much more! 
  Scroll up and click the “add to cart” button to learn the stories of incredible ancient Mesopotamia!

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  Dragons: The History of Dragon...

  Editors Charles River

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  For millennia, people considered dragons to be real, and the vivid lore of dragons has touched societies from Central America to Europe, and from Egypt to China. The popularity of dragons can easily be assessed by the number of motion pictures that include them as an integral part of their narrative, from the friendly dragons of children’s cartoons to the monsters being bred underground to unleash their horrors on humanity. Indeed, some of humanity’s deepest cultural myths have included dragons, from the Greek and Georgian tale of Jason and the Argonauts to the stories from ancient China that influence modern New Year’s festivities. 
  The English word “dragon” comes from the Greek word “drakon,” which means “snake,” and while people today may have a hard time imagining a dragon as a simple snake, some scientists think that the international nature of the myth is based on the presence of snakes on nearly every continent. Oxford professor of medieval European literature Carolyne Larrington explained, “The anthropologist David E. Jones has suggested that the dragon myth takes its origins from an innate fear of snakes, genetically encoded in humans from the time of our earliest differentiation from other primates. It is true, of course, that it makes evolutionary sense to avoid dangerous animals of every kind, but it is less clear why people should invent stories about imaginary oversized serpents in particular. Nevertheless, there is a clear benefit to tales that warn children against straying into perilous marshy areas where the serpent might seize them, or against scrambling up treacherous mountain sides in search of monsters and treasure hoards.”

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