Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo

From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo

by Mary Stanton

The only white woman honored at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, Viola Liuzzo remains an enigma more than thirty years after her murder. This full-length biography follows Liuzzo through her childhood in the South and adult life in Michigan to the 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, where she died in a Klan ambush. Author Mary Stanton draws on extensive interviews, public records, and FBI... (more)

Gideon's Trumpet (Vintage)

by Anthony Lewis

A history of the landmark case of James Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel. Notes, table of cases, index. The classic backlist bestseller. More than 800,000 sold since its first pub date of 1964.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own : An American Pilgrimage

The Life You Save May Be Your Own : An American Pilgrimage

by Paul Elie

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power... (more)

Madam Secretary Frances Perkins: a Biography of America's First Woman Cabinet MemberGeorge Martin

Madam Secretary Frances Perkins: a Biography of America's First Woman Cabinet Member

by George Martin

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)

Architects of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images

Architects of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images

by Michael Collopy

Seventy-five of the world’s greatest peacemakers — spiritual leaders, politicians, scientists, artists, and activists — testify to humanity’s diversity and its potential. Featuring 16 Nobel Peace Prize laureates and such visionaries as Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Mother Teresa, Dr. C. Everett Koop, Thich Nhat Hanh, Elie Wiesel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Coretta Scott King, Robert Redford, and more, the book... (more)

Karl Marx: A Life

by Francis Wheen

In this stunning book, the first comprehensive biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Francis Wheen gives us not a socialist ogre but a fascinating, ultimately humane man, while still examining the criticisms of his detractors. A study in contradictions, Karl Marx was at once a reserved scholar, a fiery agitator, and a gregarious socialite, while his intellect and ideology were once described as... (more)

John L. Lewis: A BIOGRAPHY

by Melvyn Dubofsky

Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monument sof the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics)

Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monument sof the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics)

by Murray Kempton

Master journalist Murray Kempton re-creates an era when many believed that the only hope for America's future lay in violent revolution. Writing as both a radical and a skeptic, Kempton looks back - from the vantage of the very un-revolutionary 1950s - on the tangled affairs of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, The Hollywood Ten, and Paul Robeson, considering overly idealistic revolutionaries and others who were... (more)

Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to ThemDale Spender

Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them

by Dale Spender

This is a study of women's thoughts and ideas spanning three centuries. The author contends that men have removed women from literary and historical records and deprived women of the knowledge of their intellectual heritage. This book is an attempt to redress the balance.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930

by Patricia Ann Schechter

Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States... (more)

Hall: Revolt Against Chivalry (Cloth)

by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

This newly updated edition connects the past with the present, using the Clarence Thomas hearings -and their characterization by Thomas as a "high-tech lynching"- to examine the links between white supremacy and the sexual abuse of black women, and the difficulty of forging an antiracist movement against sexual violence. is the account of how Jesse Daniel Ames and the antilynching campaign she led fused the... (more)

Henry Dunant (Great Nobel prizes)Ellen Hart

Henry Dunant (Great Nobel prizes)

by Ellen Hart

I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation

I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation

by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

Mixing biography and autobiography, casual talk with soul-bearing revelations, the author of Balm in Gilead uses a kind of "human archaeology" to reveal the complex, nuanced lives of six middle-class African-American achievers. Strikingly candid portraits explore the experiences and events that have shaped their identities and influenced the course of their lives.

Dr. Mary Walker: The Little Lady in Pants. (Women in America: From Colonial Times to the 20th Century)Charles McCool Synder

Dr. Mary Walker: The Little Lady in Pants. (Women in America: From Colonial Times to the 20th Century)

by Charles McCool Snyder

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)

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists (Studies in African American History and Culture)

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists (Studies in African American History and Culture)

by Jinx C. Broussard

This work describes the journalism careers of four black women within the context of the period in which they lived and worked. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Amy Jacques Garvey were among a group of approximately twenty black women journalists who wrote for newspapers, magazines and other media during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Frances Perkins: Champion of the New Deal (Oxford Portraits)

Frances Perkins: Champion of the New Deal (Oxford Portraits)

by Naomi E. Pasachoff

Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was the first woman appointed to a U.S. cabinet post and the longest-serving Secretary of Labor. Perkins had a long and illustrious record as a social activist: she reorganized New York state's factory inspections system, advocated the Workmen's Compensation Act, and promoted the legislative protection of women and child laborers. As U.S. Secretary of Labor under Roosevelt she helped... (more)

Women Who Changed the Heart of the City

by Delores T. Burger

Many unsung19th-century women tackled the worst social problems of the day while maintaining a household, raising children, and supporting their husbands' ministries. Among those included in this collection are Francis Nasmith, early rescue pioneer of 1826; Mary McAuley, former prostitute and co-founder of the first U.S. mission; Emily Trotter, a mother who prayed for her son; and Fanny Crosby who devoted herself... (more)

Frederick Douglass

by Benjamin Quarles

The son of a black slave and an unknown white father, Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) experienced first-hand the privations and brutality of America's "peculiar institution". Following his second, successful, attempt to escape, he went on to become a leading abolitionist and militant spokesman for African-American rights. A friend to Abraham Lincoln and other presidents, he held three major government offices and... (more)

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Tags: biography-social activists