Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

In this groundbreaking historical exposé, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of... (more)

We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries Of Teenagers Who Died In The Holocaust

We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries Of Teenagers Who Died In The Holocaust

by Jacob Boas

Jewish teenagers David, Yitzhak, Moshe, Eva, and Anne all kept diaries and were all killed in Hitler's death camps. These are their stories, in their own words. Author Jacob Boas is a Holocaust survivor who was born in the same camp to which Anne Frank was sent. Includes a photo insert.

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)

Alicia

by Alicia Appleman-Jurman

After losing her entire family to the Nazis at age 13, Alicia Appleman-Jurman went on to save the lives of thousands of Jews, offering them her own courage and hope in a time of upheaval and tragedy. Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has a young voice so vividly expressed the capacity for humanity and heroism in the face of Nazi brutality. HC: Bantam.

The Spanish Civil War: Revised Edition (Modern Library Paperbacks)

The Spanish Civil War: Revised Edition (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Hugh Thomas

A masterpiece of the historian’s art, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War remains the best, most engrossing narrative of one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of the twentieth century. Revised and updated with significant new material, including new revelations about atrocities perpetrated against civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this "definitive work on the subject" (Richard Bernstein,... (more)

The Thirty Years War (New York Review Books Classics)

The Thirty Years War (New York Review Books Classics)

by C. V. Wedgwood

Europe in 1618 was divided between Protestants and Catholics, and Bourbon and Hapsburg — as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless independent states. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with similar abandon and relentless persistence, destroying European powers from Spain to Sweden as they... (more)

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

by James Allen, Jon Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, Hilton Als

These images make the past present. They refute the notion that photographs of charged historical subjects lose their power, softening and becoming increasingly aesthetic with time. These images are not going softly into any artistic realm. Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society and in many ways reaching up to the present. They give one a deeper and far... (more)

Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

In South Africa, where Blacks and whites are caught in the winds of change, a young woman tries to uphold the radical heritage she received from her martyred parents while carving out a sense of self.

Destiny of Fire

by Zoe Oldenbourg

The final installment of Oldenbourg's bestselling and brilliant historical trilogy describes the fate and misfortune of the noble Seigneur of Montgeil and his family, victims of the cruel "Fourth Crusades" at the beginning of the 13th century.

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England

by Carol F. Karlsen

Confessing to "Familiarity with the Devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens, was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. In 1662, Ann Cole was "taken with very strange Fits" and fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events in Salem took place. More than three hundred years... (more)

Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War

Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War

by Harry Fisher

The Spanish Civil War served as an ideological and physical battleground for visionary Americans wishing to combat the spread of fascism. Harry Fisher was one such idealist who became a solider in the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American contingent of international volunteers dedicated to defeating Franco's forces. Fisher was one of the earliest American volunteers and one of the few to participate in... (more)

The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America

The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America

by William M. Shea

One of the most intriguing questions in contemporary American Christianity is whether the recent warming of relations between Catholics and conservative evangelicals promises a thaw in the ice age that has lasted since the sixteenth century. American evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics have hated and suspected one another since colonial times. In the twentieth century, however, each community has... (more)

Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation

Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation

by Julia Kirk Blackwelder

Julia Kirk Blackwelder focuses on the beauty education industry in racially segregated communities from World War I to the 1960s. She explores the industry as a locus of black entrepreneurial effort and aspiration and describes the work of two key players resisting racial prejudice.

The Iron Furnace: A Holocaust Survivor's StoryGeorge Topas

The Iron Furnace: A Holocaust Survivor's Story

by George Topas

Topas was a Jewish teenager living in Poland when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. He survived the horrors of the concentration camps by learning to live by his wits--including passing himself off as an "inventor" to work on a "secret weapon" that was never produced. His life was saved at the end of the war when Allied soldiers intercepted the camp's inmates and guards on the way to an execution site. Of... (more)

Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

by John Higham

Powell V. Alabama: The Scottsboro Boys and American Justice (Historic Supreme Court Cases)

Powell V. Alabama: The Scottsboro Boys and American Justice (Historic Supreme Court Cases)

by Gerald Horne

Examines the individuals and the issues involved in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case which affirmed the right of an accused person to effective legal representation.

Abiding Hope: Bearing Witness to the Holocaust

Abiding Hope: Bearing Witness to the Holocaust

by Benjamin A. Samuelson

HISTORY / JEWISH / HOLOCAUST. There will come a time, not too many years from now, when no one who suffered at the hands of the Nazis will be here to proclaim: "I was there. This happened to me. I saw this." Author Benjamin Samuelson is one of few survivors of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando: "I don’t understand how or why I made it through alive. . . . I woke, ate, did the task assigned me, and had but one... (more)

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

by Perez Zagorin

Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book... (more)

The Armenians: A People in ExileDavid Marshall Lang

The Armenians: A People in Exile

by David Marshall Lang

Lynching in Mississippi: A History, 1865-1965

Lynching in Mississippi: A History, 1865-1965

by Julius Eric Thompson

Lynching, the mob practice of kidnapping and murdering as a form of vigilante justice, was especially prevalent in Mississippi. During the 100 years after the Civil War, almost one in every ten lynchings in the United States took place in Mississippi. As in other southern states, lynchings were carried out primarily by white mobs against black victims. Characterized by brutality and the complicity of communities... (more)

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Tags: history of intolerance

The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

by Douglas A. Blackmon