Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Americas

It's the 1970s, and the fight for women's rights is gaining speed. In the sports world, Billie Jean King is breaking gender barriers on the tennis court. Janet Guthrie doesn't consider herself a "women's libber," but to racing's good ol' boys, she's a threat. When Guthrie makes a bid for Indy in 1976, the other drivers slam her mercilessly, even suggesting she's really a man. Fans heckle her, hoping she'll crash. Guthrie smiles through the pain and qualifies for Indy in 1978.

Johnny Tom, a Chinese immigrant, is promised Johnny Tom, a Chinese immigrant, is promised American citizenship if he serves with the Union Army. But first he must survive the carnage of battles and rampant racism among the ranks. Desperate to find him, his daughter, Era, becomes a Union spy while nursing soldiers in Confederate camps. She falls in love with Warren, a one-armed cavalryman, and her loyalties become divided between her beloved father in the North and the man who sustains her in the South.

In this impressive, well-researched biography, Phelps separates historical fact from long-standing myth to reveal the life of Nathan Hale, a young man who deserves to be remembered as an original American patriot. Using Hale's own journals and letters as well as testimonies from his friends and contemporaries, Phelps depicts the Revolution as it was seen from the ground.

Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration offers an unusual and irresistible look at her life and her myriad interests and accomplishments. Created by the people who know her best - her longtime friends Marcia Ann Gillespie and Richard A. Long, and her niece, Rosa Johnson Butler - it captures Angelou at home, at work, and in the public eye.

In this, Frederick Douglass’s second memoir, the abolitionist leader reflects further on the inhuman oppression he had personally endured and explores the larger impact of such injustice on society as a whole. At the time of writing, Douglass had emerged from chattel slavery in Maryland to a qualified freedom in the North and become a renowned speaker on the power of literacy and self-reliance. This story goes deeper than what Douglass was able to address in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass....

Absolute Madness tells the disturbing true story of Joseph Christopher, a white serial killer who targeted black males and struck fear into the residents of Buffalo and New York City in the 1980s. Dubbed both the .22-Caliber Killer and the Midtown Slasher, Christopher allegedly claimed eighteen victims during a savage four-month spree across the state.

The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined.

Award-winning historian David Pietrusza unpacks the most ingloriously iconic headline in the history of presidential elections - DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN - to reveal the 1948 campaign's backstage events and recount the down-to-the-wire brawl fought against the background of an erupting Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the birth of Israel, and a post-war America facing exploding storms over civil rights and domestic communism.

This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime - a two-year assignment in Havana. For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty shelves, Ariosto uncovers the island’s subtle absurdities, its Cold War mystique, and the hopes of a people in the throes of transition.

In fall 1967, friends Linda Tomaszewski and Christine Rothschild are freshmen at the University of Wisconsin. The students in the hippie college town of Madison are letting down their hair - and their guards. But amid the peace rallies lurks a killer. When Christine's body is found, her murder sends shockwaves across college campuses, and the Age of Aquarius gives way to a decade of terror. Linda knows the killer, but when police ignore her pleas, he slips away. For the next forty years, Linda embarks on a cross-country quest to find him.

American Exceptionalism and American Innocence examines the stories we’re told that lead us to think that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, regardless of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, and the more than a century’s worth of imperialist war that the U.S. has wrought on the planet. Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong detail just what Captain America’s shield tells us about the pretensions of U.S. foreign policy, how Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates engage in humanitarian imperialism, and more.

Henry Box Brown’s narrative of his self-liberation was sensational when it was first published, and it remains an extraordinary account today. With the help of abolitionists in Virginia and Philadelphia, Brown arranged to have himself shipped to a Pennsylvania port in a three-by-two-foot wooden crate, bored with three holes to enable him to breathe. After twenty-seven hours and over 350 miles by wagon, rail, boat, and ferry, he eventually made his way to deliverance. But Brown’s memoir is more than a story of endurance and escape.

Physician, activist, and author Charles Alexander Eastman was the first Native American certified in Western medicine and one of the first authors of any background to emphasize the Native American perspective. In The Soul of the Indian, he shares the customs, rituals, celebrations, and beliefs of Native American spirituality, and in so doing provides a powerful account of the “Great Mystery” at their core.

This book is the compelling story of President Obama’s domestic policy decisions made between September 2008 and his inauguration on January 20, 2009. Unlike all other presidents except Abraham Lincoln - who decided not to allow slavery to expand westward before he was sworn in - Barack Obama determined the fate of his presidency before he took office. The results of these fateful decisions led to Donald Trump taking his place eight years later. This book describes how and why these decisions were made, and discusses whether the outcomes could have been different.

A book for this moment: Both an assessment of our current political leadership and a vision of those who can bring substantive change. Who are the new progressive leaders emerging to lead the post-Trump return to democracy in America? National political correspondent and award-winning author D.D. Guttenplan's The Next Republic is an extraordinarily intense and wide-ranging account of the recent fall and incipient rise of democracy in America. The Next Republic profiles nine successful activists who are changing the course of American history right now.

Veteran White House reporter April Ryan thought she had seen everything in her two decades as a White House correspondent. And then came the Trump administration. In Under Fire, Ryan takes us inside the confusion and chaos of the Trump White House to understand how she and other reporters adjusted to the new normal. She takes us inside the policy debates, the revolving door of personnel appointments, and what it is like when she, as a reporter asking difficult questions, finds herself in the spotlight, becoming part of the story.

In this candid oral history of a presidential tenure, author Brian Abrams reveals the behind-the-scenes stories that illuminate the eight years of the Obama White House through more than one hundred exclusive interviews. Among those given a voice in this extraordinary account are Obama’s cabinet secretaries; his teams of speechwriters, legal advisers, and campaign strategists; as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who fought for or against his agenda. They recall the early struggles of an idealistic outsider candidate and speak openly about the exacting work that led to cornerstone legislation.

At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men - including half of the ten boys in his own family - end up in the criminal justice system. What role did poverty, race, and faith play? What effect did living in the South, in the Bible Belt, have?

First published in 1903, this groundbreaking work is a cornerstone of African American literary history and a foundational text in the field of sociology. In these fourteen essays, W. E. B. Du Bois introduces and explores the concept of “double-consciousness”—a term he uses to describe the experience of living as an African American and having a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Though an examination of Black life in post-Civil War America, The Souls of Black Folk has had a lasting impact on civil rights and the discussion of race in the United States.

This illuminating study traces the transformation of the right to arms from its inception in English and colonial American law to today's impassioned gun-control debate. As historian and legal scholar Patrick J. Charles shows, what the right to arms means to Americans, as well as what it legally protects, has changed drastically since its first appearance in the 1689 Declaration of Rights. Armed in America explores how and why the right to arms transformed at different points in history. The right was initially meant to serve as a parliamentary right of resistance.