Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

by Michael D'Orso, John Lewis

The son of an Alabama sharecropper, and now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life, one that found him at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis was present at all the major battlefields of the movement. Arrested more than forty times and severely beaten on several... (more)

How Am I to Be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith (Gender and American Culture)

How Am I to Be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith (Gender and American Culture)

by Lillian Eugenia Smith

This compelling volume offers the first full portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Smith devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a... (more)

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work

by Susan Cheever

The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists, as these thinkers came to be called, challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels, and... (more)

I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America

I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America

by Barbara Summers, Barbara Summers, Brian Lanker

Foreward by Maya Angelou STC is proud to celebrate the tenth anniversary of I Dream A World with this completely revised and updated paperback edition that charts the achievements of a remarkable group of African-American women and their continued impact on the world. First published in 1989, I Dream A World, a collection of 75 portraits, has been an enormous success, selling more than 450,000 copies and... (more)

Friend of life;: The biography of Rufus M. JonesElizabeth (Gray) Vining

Friend of life;: The biography of Rufus M. Jones

by Elizabeth (Gray) Vining

Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School: 1892-1918

Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School: 1892-1918

by Mary Jo Deegan

Elizabeth Blackwell: First Woman Doctor of Modern Times

Elizabeth Blackwell: First Woman Doctor of Modern Times

by Adele Glimm

As reported by a fellow student, when Elizabeth Blackwell arrived at her first class in medical school in 1847, "A hush fell over the class as if each member had been stricken with paralysis...A death-like stillness prevailed during the lecture." Elizabeth Blackwell tells the fascinating story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician in the United States. Blazing trails and overcoming prejudice ... (more)

Harps in the wind;: The story of the singing Hutchinsons,Carol Ryrie Brink

Harps in the wind;: The story of the singing Hutchinsons,

by Carol Ryrie Brink

The second biography this year of the Hutchinsons of New Hampshire (Singin' Yankees- P.D. Jordan, Univ. of Minn.-p. 238) the entertainment value of this one is somewhat impaired by the interruption of the narrative as excepts from original documents are introduced. This family, whose thirteen sons and daughters were one of the most popular groups of singers of the 19th century, was connected also with almost every... (more)

A Wobbly Life: IWW Organizer E.F. Doree

by Ellen Doree Rosen

Early in the twentieth century, the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), fought for the rights of workers - common laborers, migrants, immigrants, black workers - unprotected by the craft unions. In the face of beatings, kidnappings, and lynchings by vigilantes, company detectives, and hired guns, the Wobblies organized in mining and lumber camps, the wheat fields, on docksides and in textile... (more)

Unsung Hero of the Great War: The Life and Witness of Ben SalmonTorin R. T. Finney

Unsung Hero of the Great War: The Life and Witness of Ben Salmon

by Torin R. T. Finney

American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll

by Orvin Larson

Biography of Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)

Religious Revolutionaries: The Rebels Who Reshaped American Religion

Religious Revolutionaries: The Rebels Who Reshaped American Religion

by Robert C. Fuller

In this clever and entertaining look at the United States and religious freedom, Robert C. Fuller introduces us to religious revolutionaries who, in very unique ways, shaped American religious tradition and fought to establish new forms of spirituality. Chronological in scope, Religious Revolutionaries takes us from Puritanism and Calvinism in America's colonial period to present-day belief systems. We meet... (more)

Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene BalchMercedes M. Randall

Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch

by Mercedes M. Randall

Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America

Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America

by Edwin S. Gaustad

This well-written, solidly researched biography should be read by all well-informed Americans with a serious interest in the origins of our traditions of religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Gaustad (retired professor of history, University of California at Riverside and the author of several works, including A Religious History of America , HarperCollins, 1966; 1990. rev. ed.) makes... (more)

Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination (Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series)

Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination (Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series)

by Stephen H. Browne

This work aims to provide an understanding of Grimke's purposeful engagement of the rhetoric of confrontation, her rhetorical use of violence in antislavery discourse, and her emergence as a witness to the moral truths of her time.

The Morning Star: Wycliffe and the Dawn of the Reformation

The Morning Star: Wycliffe and the Dawn of the Reformation

by G. H. W. Parker

A.J. Muste, pacifist & prophet: His relation to the Society of Friends (Pendle Hill pamphlet)Jo Ann Robinson

A.J. Muste, pacifist & prophet: His relation to the Society of Friends (Pendle Hill pamphlet)

by Jo Ann Robinson

FANNY WRIGHT: REBEL IN AMERICA

by Celia Morris

No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest

No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest

by Kathleen Blee

Working-class Appalachian women on the picket line, fighting for better working conditions. White women organizing against the racial integration of schools. Native American women struggling for Indian treaty rights. African American women in the Black Panther Party. What prompts these women to adopt political stances outside mainstream politics? How are these women changed by personal experiences of militancy and... (more)

Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet

by Luther E. Smith

This book is meant to stimulate scholarship on Thurman's significance as a major religious figure. It is valuable for interpreting Thurman's thoughts. Any reader or student of Howard Thurman, or anyone curious to know Thurman, will want this book.

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Tags: biography-agitators-prophets-trouble-makers