Catalog Search Results
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"Crisis has a way of laying bare our truest selves: who we trust, which principles and impulses we heed, whose lives we deem expendable. As it ravaged millions of lives, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed and accentuated the dividing lines that had already, for decades, splintered American public life. Against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election, misinformation regimes, and the transformation of the facemask into a flagrant political symbol,...
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"The brank may be described simply as an iron framework; which was placed on the head, closing it in a kind of cage; it had in front a plate of iron, which, either sharpened or covered with spikes, was so situated as to be placed in the mouth of the victim, and if she attempted to move her tongue in any way whatever, it was certain to be shockingly injured. She thus suffered for telling her mind to some petty tyrant in office, or speaking plainly...
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"An exploration of humanity's relationship with ice since the dawn of civilization, Of Ice and Men reminds us that only by understanding this unique substance can we save the ice on our planet--and perhaps ourselves. Ice tells a story. It writes it in rock. It lays it down, snowfall by snowfall at the ends of the earth where we may read it like the rings on a tree. It tells our planet's geological and climatological tale. Ice tells another story...
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A riveting true story of a young woman's days stripping in grunge-era San Francisco where a radical group of dancers banded together to unionize and run the club on their own terms. When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a stage surrounded by mirrors, in platform heels, and not much else. So began Jenny's career as a stripper...
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"A revelatory history of the transformational decade after World War II when Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul, and the horrors of the Holocaust"--
The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half...
87) She caused a riot: 100 unknown women who built cities, sparked revolutions, & massively crushed it
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Women's stories are often written as if they spent their entire time on Earth casting woeful but beautiful glances towards the horizon and sighing into the bitter wind at the thought of any conflict. Well, that's not how it f**king happened. When you hear about a woman who was 100% pure and good, you're probably missing the best chapters in her life's story. Maybe she slept around. Maybe she stole. Maybe she crashed planes. Maybe she got shot, or...
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While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation. It is born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to 'perform' our lives online. She examines the phenomenon through a variety of lenses, and...
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At midday on May 4, 1970, after three days of protests, several thousand students and the Ohio National Guard faced off at opposite ends of the grassy campus Commons at Kent State University. At noon, the Guard moved out. Twenty-four minutes later, Guardsmen launched a 13-second, 67-shot barrage that left four students dead and nine wounded, one paralyzed for life. The story doesn't end there, though. A horror of far greater proportions was narrowly...
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A black porter whips a white Englishman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. A Mauritanian diver is dispatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England. They were present at some of the most defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like...
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"A cultural history of fitness explores the ways in which human exercise has changed over time and what can be learned from our athletic ancestors, evaluating whether today's high-tech exercise machines are actually productive while making recommendations based on early health practices, "--NoveList.
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In 1997, no one in the small town (pop. 100) of Redford, Texas knew that U.S. Marine teams, fully camouflaged and armed with M16 rifles, had been secretly deployed to their section of the border. Farmers like the Hernández family, who lived by the river, went on working their fields and tending to their livestock. On the evening of May 20, 18-year-old Esequiel Hernández Jr. left the house to tend to his family's goats, taking with him, as usual,...
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In October 1969 hundreds of young people, clad in football helmets and wielding lead pipes, marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows in their path. This was the first demonstration of the Weather Underground's Days of Rage. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, the organization waged a low-level war against the U.S. government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building,...
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Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created...
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This film is the followup of First contact. It traces the fortunes of Joe Leahy, the mixed-race son of Australian explorer Michael Leahy, in his uneasy relationship with his tribal neighbors. Joe built his coffee plantation on land bought from the Ganiga in the mid 1970s. European educated, raised in the highlands of Papua, freed by his mixed race from the entanglements of tribal obligation, Joe leads a Western lifestyle governed by individualism...
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The evolution of the battle for true equality in America seen through the men, ideas, and politics behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed at the end of the Civil War.
On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America;...
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"Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, the nation has much older Spanish roots--ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims...
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"From blind dates to whirlwind romances to long separations, War Bonds highlights stories of couples who met or married during World War II. Each of the 30 stories begins with a WWII-era song title and concludes with a look at wartime couples in their twilight, as well as when they were so hopeful and young and determined to save the world. Illustrated with photographs from the 1940s as well as current ones of each couple, War Bonds offers readers...
99) Hard times
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"Hard Times is perhaps the archetypal Dickens novel, full as it is with family difficulties, estrangement, rotten values and unhappiness. It was published in 1854 and it is the story of the family of Thomas Gradgrind, and occurs in the imaginary Coketown, an industrial city inspired by Preston. Gradgrind is a man obsessed with misguided 'Utilitarian' values that make him trust facts, statistics and practicality more than emotion and is based upon...
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Décharné traces the colorful history of slang, from Elizabethan highwaymen to the rap and hip-hop of today. He shows how meanings change over years; introduces us to flying aces, pickpockets, and carnival geeks who have left their impression on our language; and shows how slang leaks into the mainstream to infuse language with vitality.