Listen Up! : Leaders, Thinkers, Writers, Activists Speak Their Mind

Hawaii's Story

An account of those difficult years at the end of the nineteenth century, when native Hawaiian historian David Malo's 1837 prophecy concerning "the small ones" being "gobbled up" came true for the Hawaiian Islands.

Featured Figure: Queen Liliuokalani for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

The diaries of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, 1885-1900

Queen Liliuokalani, the eighth monarch of the Hawaiian Islands, is known and honored throughout the world, even though she was never ceremonially crowned. Published here for the first time, the Queen's diaries, which she penned between 1885 and 1900, reveal her experience as heir apparent and monarch of the Hawaiian Islands during one of the most intense, complicated, and politically charged eras in Hawaiian history. Collectively, the Queen's diaries, introduced, edited, and annotated by David W. Forbes, provide the reader with invaluable insights into Liliuokalani's private life, thoughts, and deeds during her rule as sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands; the overthrow of her government in 1893; her arrest, imprisonment, trial, and abdication in 1895; and her efforts in Washington, DC, to avert the 1898 annexation of her beloved islands to the United States. 

Featured Figure: Queen Liliuokalani for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

The Routledge companion to Black women's cultural histories

In the social and cultural histories of women and feminism, Black women have long been overlooked or ignored. The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Cultural Histories is a comprehensive reference work for contemporary scholarship on the cultural histories of Black women across the diaspora spanning different eras from ancient times into the twenty-first century. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts. Within these sections a diverse range of women, places and issues are explored including: The Queen of Sheba, Black Women in Early Modern European Art and Culture, Enslaved Muslim Women in the Antebellum United States, Sally Hemings, and Phillis Wheatley, Black women writers in Early 20th Century Paris, Black women, Civil Rights, South African Apartheid, and sexual violence and resistance in the United States in recent history.

Featured Figure: Marsha P. Johnson for Women's History Month

Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches

Ripples of Hope brings together the most influential and important civil rights speeches from the entire range of American history-from the colonial period to the present. Gathered from the great speeches of the civil rights movement of African Americans, Asian Americans, gays, Hispanic Americans, and women, Ripples of Hope includes voices as diverse as Sister Souljah, Spark Matsui, and Harvey Milk, which, taken as a whole, constitute a unique chronicle of the modern civil rights movement. Featuring a foreword by President Bill Clinton and an afterword by Mary Frances Berry, this collection represents not just a historical first but also an indispensable resource for readers searching for an alternative history of American rhetoric. Edited and with an introduction by former Clinton speechwriter Josh Gottheimer, the stirring speeches that make up this volume provide an important perspective on our nation's development, and will inform the future debate on civil rights.

Featured Figure: Yuri Kochiyama for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Asian America: A Primary Source Reader

An essential collection that brings together the core primary texts of the Asian American experience in one volume An essential volume for the growing academic discipline of Asian American studies, this collection of core primary texts draws from a wide range of fields, from law to visual culture to politics, covering key historical and cultural developments that enable students to engage directly with the Asian American experience over the past century. The primary sources, organized around keywords, often concern multiple hemispheres and movements, making this compendium valuable for a number of historical, ethnic, and cultural study undergraduate programs.

Featured Figure: Yuri Kochiyama for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Knowledge for Justice: An Ethnic Studies Reader

Knowledge for Justice is a joint publication of UCLA's four ethnic studies research centers: American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and African American Studies. The book addresses the intersectional intellectual, social, and political struggles that confront the groups represented in the anthology. The selections articulate the specificity of each racial ethnic group's struggle while simultaneously interrogating the ways in which such labels or categories are inadequate.

Featured Figure: Yuri Kochiyama for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama

On February 12, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama cradled Malcolm X in her arms as he died, but her role as a public servant and activist began much earlier than this pivotal public moment. Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of this courageous woman, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with Kochiyama's family, friends, and the subject herself, Diane C. Fujino traces Kochiyama's life from an "all-American" childhood to her achievements as a tireless defender of - and fighter for - human rights. Heartbeat of Struggle is a source of inspiration and guidance for anyone committed to social change.

Featured Figure: Yuri Kochiyama for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Women Photographers

Assembled from public and private collections the world over, the extraordinary images presented in this volume reflect the work of 73 women photographers from the mid-19th century to the present. They range from such early Victorian pioneers as Lady Clementina Hawarden to the recent work of Cindy Sherman, reconstructing a virtual pantheon. As well as encompassing the photographs of important early figures in the art--Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Kasebier--Sullivan (The Nude) pays considerable attention to international modernist artists (Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange). Each photographer is represented by several examples of her work, eliciting a gamut of emotions from the viewer--cerebral admiration in the case of Margaret Bourke-White's shots of technology; horror in response to Lee Miller's depiction of the liberated Dachau concentration camp. Another service rendered by the book is the unveiling of obscure practitioners, such as the innovative English portraitist Madame Yevonde. A perceptive essay by art historian Janis provides a provocative critical framework for all.

Featured Figure: Nan Goldin for Jewish American Heritage Month

In Visible Archives

Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities. In 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the community networks that produced this resonant artifact and others, analyzing how visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities. The art highlighted in In Visible Archives demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities, thus serving as blueprints for future activism and advocacy--work that is urgent now more than ever as LGBTQ+ and women's rights face challenges and restrictions across the nation.

Featured Figure: Nan Goldin for Jewish American Heritage Month

The reclining nude : Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin

This book, a sensuous evocation of images of the reclining nude, claims a female-identified pleasure in looking. Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin are re-imagining images of female beauty, display, (auto)eroticism, and intimacy. The reclining nude is compelling, for female-identified artists in the ethically adventurous, politically complex feminist issues it engages.

Featured Figure: Nan Goldin for Jewish American Heritage Month

Interrogating secularism : race and religion in Arab transnational literature and art

Interrogating Secularism is a call to rethink binary categories of "religion" and "secularism" in contemporary Arab American fiction and art. While most studies that explore the traffic between literature and issues of secularism emphasize how canonical texts naturalize and reinforce secular values, Interrogating Secularism approaches this nexus through novels written by and about ethnic and religious minorities. Haque juxtaposes accounts of secular experience in the writing of Arab Anglophone authors such as Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, Khaled Mattawa, Laila Lalami, and Rawi Hage, with Arab and Muslim artists such as Ninar Esber, Mounir Fatmi, Hasan Elahi, and Emily Jacir. Looking at multiple genres and modes of aesthetic production, including AIDS narratives, visual art, and digital media, Haque explores how their conventions are used to subvert the ideals tied to secularism and the various anxieties and investments that support secularism as a premise. These authors and artists critique Western iterations of secular thought in spaces such as art exhibits, airports, borders, and literary discourses to capture how the secularism thesis reproduces the exclusivity it intends to remedy.

Featured Figure: Emily Jacir for Arab American Heritage Month

Theater in the Middle East

The collected essays from noteworthy dramatists and scholars in this book represent new ways of understanding theater in the Middle East not as geographical but transcultural spaces of performance. What distinguishes this book from previous works is that it offers new analysis on a range of theatrical practices across a region, by and large, ignored for the history of its dramatic traditions and cultures, and it does so by emphasizing diverse performances in changing contexts. Topics include Arab, Iranian, Israeli, diasporic theatres from pedagogical perspectives to reinvention of traditions, from translation practices to political resistance expressed in various performances from the nineteenth century to the present.

Featured Figure: Emily Jacir for Arab American Heritage Month

Emily Jacir : Europa

This book offers one of the largest surveys of the work of artist Emily Jacir, known for her reflective works of art that are both extremely personal and acutely political. This book focuses on the award-winning artist's relationship to Europe and the Mediterranean and explores how one relates to a particular place. Incorporating historic archival material, Jacir traces Europe through its history of colonialism and trade routes, reanimating it through performative gestures. Her work offers uniquely personal revelations about Europe's culture of exile and surveillance, etymology and language, as well as the tension between figuration and abstraction in art. Jacir utilizes conceptual tools that reveal the political limitations of society, creating scenarios that erode or question communal boundaries and borders.

Woman of Valor

This illuminating biography of Margaret Sanger--the woman who fought for birth control in America--describes her childhood, her private life, her relationships with Emma Goldman and John Reed, her public role, and more. Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives. Now, Ellen Chesler provides an authoritative and widely acclaimed biography of this great emancipator, whose lifelong struggle helped women gain control over their own bodies. 

Featured Figure: Margaret Sanger for Women’s History Month

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4

When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. A powerful documentary history of a transformative twentieth-century figure, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4 is a primer for the debates on individual choice, sex education, and planned parenthood that remain all-too-pertinent in our own time.

Featured Figure: Margaret Sanger for Women’s History Month

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 1

The birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was one of the most controversial and compelling figures in the twentieth century. The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 1 is composed of Sanger's letters, diaries, journals, articles, and speeches, most of which have not appeared previously in print. Now in paperback, the book documents the critical phases and influences of an American feminist icon and offers rare glimpses into her working-class childhood, burgeoning feminism, spiritual and scientific interests, sexual explorations, and diverse roles as wife, mother, lover, nurse, journalist, radical socialist, and activist.

Featured Figure: Margaret Sanger for Women’s History Month

Sí, Ella Puede!

Featured Figure: Dolores Huerta for Poverty Awareness Month

A Dolores Huerta Reader

Farm labor leader and civil rights advocate Dolores Huerta first worked with César Chávez as a community organizer in Mexican American areas of southern California in the mid-1950s. Chávez dreamed of organizing farm workers, and in 1962 he started the National Farm Workers Association. He asked Huerta to work with them, and in the next three years they recruited a number of members. In 1965 the NFWA joined the AFL-CIO-affiliated Agricultural Workers' Committee in a strike against large grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley--a five-year strike that raised national awareness of the dismal treatment of the workers and led to the formation of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta's contributions to these efforts were invaluable in recruiting women for the cause, in keeping the union focused on nonviolent actions, and in gaining support in the eastern United States for the effective grape boycott that led to contracts for the union. Ten years after they started, they celebrated the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. They had made history. This is the first book to focus on Dolores Huerta. Throughout six decades of activism, she has made her own history and has been part of major events in the history of the country, standing alongside Robert Kennedy the night he was assassinated. Often called la Pasionaria, the passionate one, she continues to speak out on labor, environmental, antiwar, and women's issues. A Dolores Huerta Reader includes an informative biographical introduction, articles and book excerpts written about her, her own writing and speeches, and a recent interview with Mario García where she expresses her unbending dedication to social justice. Anyone who wants to know more about Dolores Huerta should start with this book.

Featured Figure: Dolores Huerta for Poverty Awareness Month

Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies

Among the most influential and insightful thinkers of her generation, Audre Lorde (1934-1992) inspired readers and activists through her poetry, autobiography, essays, and her political action. Most scholars have situated her work within the context of the women's, gay and lesbian, and black civil rights movements within the United States. However, Lorde forged coalitions with women in Europe, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, and twenty years after her passing, these alliances remain largely undocumented and unexplored. Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies is the first book to systematically document and thoroughly investigate Lorde's influence beyond the United States. Arranged in three thematically interrelated sections--Archives, Connections, and Work--the volume brings together scholarly essays, interviews, Lorde's unpublished speech about Europe, and personal reflections and testimonials from key figures throughout the world. Using a range of interdisciplinary approaches, contributors assess the reception, translation, and circulation of Lorde's writing and activism within different communities, audiences, and circles. They also shed new light on the work Lorde inspired across disciplinary borders.

Featured Figure: Audre Lorde for Black History Month

Zami: a New Spelling of My Name

Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers "Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page."--Off Our Backs "Among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character."--The New York Times

Featured Figure: Audre Lorde for Black History Month

A Burst of Light

"Lorde's words -- on race, cancer, intersectionality, parenthood, injustice -- burn with relevance 25 years after her death." -- O, The Oprah Magazine Winner of the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award, this path-breaking collection of essays is a clarion call to build communities that nurture our spirit.

Featured Figure: Audre Lorde for Black History Month

Sister Outsider

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. "[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware."--The New York Times  In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . "

Featured Figure: Audre Lorde for Black History Month

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems--selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.Among the essays included here are:"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action""The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House""I Am Your Sister"Excerpts from the American Book Award-winning A Burst of LightThe poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:"Martha""A Litany for Survival""Sister Outsider""Making Love to Concrete"

Featured Figure: Audre Lorde for Black History Month

I Am Your Sister

Audre Lorde was not only a famous black poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past half century. I Am Your Sister collects her non-fiction prose from 1976 to 1990, and it is the first volume to provide a full picture of Lorde's political work (as opposed to her aesthetic work). The essays cover an impressive variety of topics: sexuality, race, gender, culture, class, parenting, disease, resistance, and power - both within the United States and across the African diaspora. While Lorde is best known as a progenitor of black feminist studies, I Am Your Sister stresses her signal influence in the creation of gay and lesbian studies. Lorde's work presaged the late 1980s shift in the academy toward the emphasis on the tight connections between race, class, gender, and sexuality - and later disability. Accordingly, the breadth of topics Lorde tackles in the various essays in I Am Your Sister capture the spirit of intersectionality that now dominates analysis in the humanities and critical social sciences.

Featured Figure: Audre Lorde for Black History Month

We Go High

Follow the life lessons of 30 remarkable women of color who are making their mark on society and culture. We Go High brings together the inspiring stories, motivational quotes, and personal philosophies of 30 influential women of color who have sought to overcome challenges in their lives. From activists to scientists, artists to sporting icons, each woman's story is different-but all have in common a deep-seated resilience to fight against the prejudices and barriers to success that women of color face on a daily basis.

Featured Figure: Simone Biles for Black History Month

Good to Go

An eye-opening exploration of how the human body can best recover and adapt to sports and fitness training. In recent years recovery has become a sports and fitness buzzword. Anyone who works out or competes at any level is bombarded with the latest recovery products and services: from drinks and shakes to compression sleeves, foam rollers, electrical muscle stimulators, and sleep trackers. In Good to Go, acclaimed FiveThirtyEight science writer Christie Aschwanden takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening tour through this strange world.  At a time when the latest recovery products and services promise so much, Good to Go seeks answers to the fundamental question: Do any of them actually help the body recover and achieve peak performance?

Featured Figure: Simone Biles for Black History Month

Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, did more than any other single publication or event to alert the world to the hazards of environmental poisoning and to shape a powerful social movement that would alter the course of American history. This definitive biography, based on personal documents and reminiscences unavailable to others, shows how Carson, already a famous nature writer, became a reluctant reformer, confronting a government and industry that were widely misusing extremely dangerous chemicals, unquestioned by the public. This book illuminates and evaluates for the first time her personal courage in setting forth an ecological vision of humankind's place in the natural world and her contribution to the contemporary environmental movement. It is also the first to describe her personal life, showing the spirited, lonely, and determined woman behind the publicly shy but brilliant scientist and writer. Illustrated with photographs, many never before published, this is a compelling and masterful portrait of a heroic woman who was not afraid to question the political direction of her time.

Featured Figure: Rachel Carson for Women’s History Month

On a Farther Shore

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the environmental movement. She loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries, including the international bestseller The Sea Around Us. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, On a Farther Shore reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in the natural world than in the literary one that embraced her. William Souder also writes sensitively of Carson's romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman, and of her death from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary new biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the twentieth century.

Featured Figure: Rachel Carson for Women’s History Month

Rachel Carson and Her Sisters

In Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of environmental pioneer and scientist Rachel Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers and introducing her to a new, contemporary audience.Rachel Carson was the first American to combine two longstanding, but separate strands of American environmentalism--the love of nature and a concern for human health. Widely known for her 1962 best-seller, Silent Spring, Carson is today often perceived as a solitary "great woman," whose work single-handedly launched a modern environmental movement. But as Musil demonstrates, Carson's life's work drew upon and was supported by already existing movements, many led by women, in conservation and public health. On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this book helps underscore Carson's enduring environmental legacy and brings to life the achievements of women writers and advocates, such as Ellen Swallow Richards, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Terry Tempest Williams, Sandra Steingraber, Devra Davis, and Theo Colborn, all of whom overcame obstacles to build and lead the modern American environmental movement.

Featured Figure: Rachel Carson for Women’s History Month

The Edge of the Sea

Featured Figure: Rachel Carson for Women’s History Month

Silent Spring

Rarely does a single book alter the course of history, but Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did exactly that. The outrcry that followed its publication in 1962 forced the banning of DDT and spurred the revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson's passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. I tis without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century.

Featured Figure: Rachel Carson for Women’s History Month

A Wealth of Wisdom: legendary African American elders speak

A Wealth of Wisdom is a collection of stories, experiences, and observations of more than fifty African Americans, ages seventy and over, including Maya Angelou, Ray Charles, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, David Dinkins, Katherine Dunham, Dick Gregory, Robert Guillaume, Coretta Scott King, Gordon Parks, and Andrew Young. Accompanied by portraits by famed photographer Howard L. Bingham, the accounts by these pivotal leaders take us behind their historic public moments to their underlying personal realities. Camille O. Cosby and Renee Poussaint collected the stories of these national and regional leaders as a part of their work with the National Visionary Leadership Project, an organization they founded to ensure that the lessons learned from our country's African American elders are preserved and passed on to the young people who will be the leaders of tomorrow. The women and men included in this groundbreaking book represent every region in the nation, plus a wide range of professional and personal lifestyles. They are men and women whose commitment and abilities shaped this country, and in particular its African American community.

Featured Figure: Coretta Scott King for Black History Month

Notable Black American Women

A biographical narrative on 500 notable black American women, this book offers information on their various fields of activity and includes statements from the subjects themselves. Figures included in the book are Althea Gibson, Vivian Malone, Coretta Scott King, and Eartha Kitt.

Featured Figure: Coretta Scott King for Black History Month