Cynthia Stokes Brown was an avid reader and researcher. This collection is a digital representation of her personal library with the books categorized as Cynthia had them on the bookshelves in her home.
You can view the collection in it entirety or you can view them by category
American History | Big History| World History | Research | Poetry
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The Long Haul: An Autobiography
Myles Horton
In his own direct, modest, plain-spoken style, Myles Horton tells the story of the Highlander Folk School. A major catalyst for social change in the United States for more than 70 years, this school has touched the lives of so many people, including Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Pete Seeger. Filled with disarmingly honest insight and gentle humor, The Long Haul is an inspiring hymn to the possibility of social change. It is the story of Myles Horton, in his own words: the wise and moving recollections of a man of uncommon determination and vision.
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Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
Jonathan Israel
Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality--these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin was very radical indeed--far more so than most historians have been willing to recognize. In A Revolution of the Mind, Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, traces the philosophical roots of these ideas to what were the least respectable strata of Enlightenment thought--what he calls the Radical Enlightenment.
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Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What it Means for our Future
Dale Jamieson
From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. Yet greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life. In this book, the author explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. Centered in philosophy, the volume also treats the scientific, historical, economic, and political dimensions of climate change. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly to climate change, the author argues, reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities. The climate change that is underway is remaking the world in such a way that familiar comforts, places, and ways of life will disappear in years or decades rather than centuries. Climate change also threatens our sense of meaning, since it is difficult to believe that our individual actions matter. The challenges that climate change presents go beyond the resources of common sense morality; it can be hard to view such everyday acts as driving and flying as presenting moral problems. Yet there is much that we can do to slow climate change, to adapt to it and restore a sense of agency while living meaningful lives in a changing world--Publisher information.
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Writing: The Story of Alphabet and Scripts
Georges Jean
The history of writing is an epic that spans six thousand years, from the valleys of the tigris and Euphrates tot the shores of the Mediterranean. From hieroglyphics and cuneiform to the invention of printing and the rich world of modern lettering, here is writing's mysterious course as it has evolved through the ages. Writing lies at the root of our civilization; it is the accumulated memory of humankind.
- From book jacket -
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Revolutionary Change
Chalmers Johnson
A classic study by a leading theorist of revolution, Revolutionary Change has gone through eleven printings since its appearance in 1966 and been translated into German, French, and Korean. This carefully revised edition not only brings the original analysis up to date but adds two entirely new chapters: one on terrorism, the most celebrated form of political violence throughout the 1970s, and one on theories of revolution from Brinton to the present day.
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Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives By The Year 2100
Michio Kaku
Explains how science will shape human destiny and everyone's daily life by the year 2100. Kaku gives a picture of the coming century based on interviews with over three hundred of the world's top scientists who are already inventing the future in their labs.
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Earth and Cosmos
Robert K. Kandel
Earth and Cosmos presents a comprehensive view of the many connections between the environment of Man on Earth and the environment of the Earth in the cosmos. Topics covered range from matter, radiation, and the basic forces of nature to Earth's relation to the universe, the galaxy, and the sun. The energy balance and global circulation of the atmosphere are also discussed, along with continents, oceans, and climate.
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A Short History of Latin America
Benjamin Keen and Mark Wasserman
This best selling text for introductory Latin American history courses mixes a chronological and a national approach to explore the background of this fascinating region. The text' s integrating framework is the dependency theory, which stresses the economic relationship between Latin American nations and wealthier nations, particularly the United States.
The book provides in-depth coverage of society and culture in Latin America and their impact on population, settlement, trade, communication, and economic and political developments.
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Profiles in Courage
John F. Kennedy
Written in 1955 by the then junior senator from the state of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage serves as a clarion call to every American.
In this book Kennedy chose eight of his historical colleagues to profile for their acts of astounding integrity in the face of overwhelming opposition. These heroes, coming from different junctures in our nation’s history, include John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, and Robert A. Taft.
Now, a half-century later, the book remains a moving, powerful, and relevant testament to the indomitable national spirit and an unparalleled celebration of that most noble of human virtues. It resounds with timeless lessons on the most cherished of virtues and is a powerful reminder of the strength of the human spirit. Profiles in Courage is as Robert Kennedy states in the foreword: “not just stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future. What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us."
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The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome
Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider
The new global revolution is coming into being amid social, economic, technological, and cultural earthquakes that have se in motion humanity's journey into a vast unknown. the First Global Revolution outlines a strategy for mobilizing the glove for environmental security and clean technology by spelling out how to convert from a military to a civil economy, how to tackle global warming and the energy problem, and how to deal with world poverty and the disparities between North and South -- all within the context of a worldwide strategy that grapples with the current tangle of crises t make our survival possible in a radically changed globe.
- Excerpt from book jacket -
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Farmers of Forty Centuries
F. H. King
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan is a book of Asian farming. We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.
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You Call This A Democracy?: Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides
Paul Kivel
You Call This a Democracy? is a penetrating and troubling look at how the U.S. ruling class and the power elite dominate wealth, power and decision-making in all aspects of our lives and institutions. Arguing that the United States has always had a ruling class, this book does not focus on the current administration or rogue corporations, but presents a deeper, longer-term analysis of how the ruling class has created and uses the Constitution, corporations and the courts, as well as a host of other mechanisms such as tax laws, wars, buffer zones, and distractions, to dominate our society and accumulate wealth.
The book is carefully researched and referenced, and filled with numerous examples and illustrations. It is an indispensable resource for every person concerned about the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power in our society.
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I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1933-1941
Victor Klemperer
The publication of Victor Klemperer's secret diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. "In its cool, lucid style and power of observation," said The New York Times, "it is the best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." I Will Bear Witness is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day horror of the Nazi years.
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I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945
Victor Klemperer
Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.
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Columbus: His Enterprise
Hans Konig
Discusses how the expeditions of Columbus increased the wealth of Spain, yet severely damaged the lives of the native Americans.
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Death at an Early Age
Jonathan Kozol
In 1964, Jonathan Kozol entered the Boston Public School system to teach fourth grade at one of its most overcrowded inner-city schools. Here, he unflinchingly exposes the disturbing "destruction of hearts and minds in the Boston public school." Death at an Early Age is the unsparing, heart-wrenching account of the year he spent there—the most shocking and powerful personal story ever told by a young teacher, now updated with a new epilogue by the author.
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Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth… and Beyond
Lawrence Krauss
Through this astonishing work, he manages to stoke wonder at the powers and unlikely events that conspired to create our solar system, our ecosystem, and us.
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A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing
Lawrence M. Krauss
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the groundbreaking new scientific advances presenting the most recent evidence for how our universe evolved--and the implications for how it's going to end.
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The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
James Howard Kunstler
A shocking vision of a post-oil future. The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that will collapse. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.
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Eleanor and Franklin
Joseph P. Lash
In his extraordinary biography of the major political couple of the twentieth century, Joseph P. Lash reconstructs from Eleanor Roosevelt's personal papers her early life and four-decade marriage to the four-time president who brought America back from the Great Depression and helped to win World War II. The result is an intimate look at the vibrant private and public worlds of two incomparable people.
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Eleanor: The Years Alone
Joseph P. Lash
Joseph P. Lash, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and National Book Award-winning writer of Eleanor and Franklin, turns to the seventeen years Eleanor Roosevelt lived after FDR's death in 1945. Already a major figure in her own right, Roosevelt gained new stature with her work at the United Nations and her contributions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She continued her activism on behalf of civil rights, as well as her humanitarian work, which led President Harry Truman to call her the First Lady of the World. Lash has created an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary person.
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Knowing Our Future: The Startling Case for Futurology
Michael Lee
The received conventional wisdom within the global futurist community is that the future is unknowable. Knowing our future outlines a full theory of how knowable the future really is. Using case studies of prescient predictions of the social future from the time of the French Revolution through to the present Michael Lee argues that there are sound theoretical grounds for establishing a science of the future and accurately predicting it time after time. Drawing on mathematics, social theory, physics, economics, social biology and philosophy and referencing great thinkers from the Marquis de Co.
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A Dictionary of Creation Myths
David Leeming and Margaret Leeming
Provides information about the creation stories of cultures around the world, including ancient civilzations, Native Americans, and the indigenous peoples of Australia, Africa, and Polynesia; arranged alphabetically and including cross-references and commentary.
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The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers
Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly
Hunting and gathering peoples, including Kalahari Bushmen, Australian aborigines, Eskimos, and Pygmies, are the subject of endless appeal. This illustrated reference volume is the first devoted exclusively to hunting and gathering peoples that is both accessible to the nonspecialist and written by leading scholars. It is a state-of-the-art summary of knowledge on the subject, covering an extraordinary range of materials: case studies of over fifty of the world's hunter-gatherers, the archaeological background, religion and world view, music and art, questions of gender, health and nutrition, and contemporary rights.
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A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us: The Evolution of Life on Earth
Sidney Liebes, Elisabet Sahtouris, and Brian Swimme
"Imagine a walk where every step forward transports you a few million years in time. Just such a mind-expanding premise inspired this landmark book, developed from the acclaimed "Walk Through Time" exhibit on tour around the world." "Here, in one volume, is the remarkable drama of the history of the universe and life on Earth. Travel from the furious blast of the Big Bang to the first pulse of life, and on through the rich pageant of life's evolution from primordial microbes to the rise of Homo sapiens. Span 15 billion years to discover life's greatest mysteries emerging. Over 130 beautiful four-color illustrations and an absorbing narrative highlight significant events and themes in Earth's life story. The original exhibit itself is re-created as a timeline that runs throughout the book, pinpointing key stages in the evolutionary drama and where they fall in the vast sweep of time."--Jacket.
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Complexity and the Arrow of Time
Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C. W. Davies, and Michael Ruse
There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and life in particular, is 'getting more complex with time'. This book brings together a wide range of experts in science, philosophy and theology and unveils their joint effort in exploring this idea. They confront essential problems behind the theory of complexity and the role of life within it: what is complexity? When does it increase, and why? Is the universe evolving towards states of ever greater complexity and diversity? If so, what is the source of this universal enrichment? This book addresses those difficult questions, and offers a unique cross-disciplinary perspective on some of the most profound issues at the heart of science and philosophy. Readers will gain insights in complexity that reach deep into key areas of physics, biology, complexity science, philosophy and religion.
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Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
Leon F. Litwack
Based on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution."
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Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
James W. Loewen
In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen
What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education.” In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should—and could—be taught to American students.
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King Solomon's Ring
Konrad Z. Lorenz
Solomon, the legend goes, had a magic ring which enabled him to speak to the animals in their own language. Konrad Lorenz was gifted with a similar power of understanding the animal world. He was that rare beast, a brilliant scientist who could write (and indeed draw) beautifully. He did more than any other person to establish and popularize the study of how animals behave, receiving a Nobel Prize for his work. King Solomon's Ring, the book which brought him worldwide recognition, is a delightful treasury of observations and insights into the lives of all sorts of creatures, from jackdaws and water-shrews to dogs, cats and even wolves. Charmingly illustrated by Lorenz himself, this book is a wonderfully written introduction to the world of our furred and feathered friends, a world which often provides an uncanny resemblance to our own.
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The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth
James Lovelock
Proposes that all living species are components of a single organism and theorizes that the biological processes of the Earth naturally change environmental conditions to enable survival.
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Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World
Wangari Maathai
An impassioned call to heal the wounds of our planet and ourselves through the tenets of our spiritual traditions. Maathai draws inspiration from many faiths, celebrating and renewing their mandates to "repair the world." "It is so easy, in our modern world, to feel disconnected from the physical earth. Despite dire warnings and escalating concern over the state of our planet, many people feel out of touch with the natural world. Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai has spent decades working with the Green Belt Movement to help women in rural Kenya plant--and sustain--millions of trees. With their hands in the dirt, these women often find themselves empowered and "at home" in a way they never did before. Maathai wants to impart that feeling to everyone, and believes that the key lies in traditional spiritual values: love for the environment, self-betterment, gratitude and respect, and a commitment to service. While educated in the Christian tradition, Maathai draws inspiration from many faiths, celebrating the Jewish mandate tikkun olam ("repair the world") and renewing the Japanese term mottainai ("don't waste"). Through rededication to these values, she believes, we might finally bring about healing for ourselves and the earth."--Publisher's description.
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Migration in World History
Patrick Manning
Drawing on examples from a wide range of geographical regions and thematic areas, noted world historian Patrick Manning guides the reader through:
- the earliest human migrations, including the earliest hominids, their development and spread, and the controversy surrounding the rise of homo sapiens
- the rise and spread of major language groups (illustrated with original maps)
- an examination of civilizations, farmers and pastoralists from 3000 BCE to 500 CE
- trade patterns including the early Silk Road and maritime trade in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean
- the effect of migration on empire and industry between 1700 and 1900
- the resurgence of migration in the later twentieth century, including movement to cities, refugees and diasporas
- the various leading theories and debates surrounding the subject of migration.
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America Firsthand: From Settlement to Reconstruction, Volume I
Robert D. Marcus and David Burner
This distinctive, class-tested primary source reader tells America’s story through the words and other creative expressions of the ordinary and extraordinary Americans who shaped it. Now featuring the contributions of new co-author John M. Giggie, an award-winning teacher and scholar from the University of Alabama, America Firsthand offers a remarkable range of first-person perspectives that bring the past vividly to life — from an African American minister’s message of racial liberation, to the prison notes of suffragists, to a writer’s recollections of Sputnik. “Points of View” sections provide varied vantage points on important topics, and “Visual Portfolios” draw students into interpreting the visual record. This carefully crafted, ready-to-go collection saves instructors time and effort in finding consistently engaging and informative sources.
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America Firsthand: From Settlement to Reconstruction, Volume II
Robert D. Marcus and David Burner
This distinctive, class-tested primary source reader tells America’s story through the words and other creative expressions of the ordinary and extraordinary Americans who shaped it. Now featuring the contributions of new co-author John M. Giggie, an award-winning teacher and scholar from the University of Alabama, America Firsthand offers a remarkable range of first-person perspectives that bring the past vividly to life — from an African American minister’s message of racial liberation, to the prison notes of suffragists, to a writer’s recollections of Sputnik. “Points of View” sections provide varied vantage points on important topics, and “Visual Portfolios” draw students into interpreting the visual record. This carefully crafted, ready-to-go collection saves instructors time and effort in finding consistently engaging and informative sources.
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Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution
Lynn Margulis
Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations are naturally selected, but they leave unanswered how variant organisms come to be in the first place.In Symbiotic Planet, renowned scientist Lynn Margulis shows that symbiosis, which simply means members of different species living in physical contact with each other, is crucial to the origins of evolutionary novelty. Ranging from bacteria, the smallest kinds of life, to the largest—the living Earth itself—Margulis explains the symbiotic origins of many of evolution's most important innovations. The very cells we're made of started as symbiotic unions of different kinds of bacteria. Sex—and its inevitable corollary, death—arose when failed attempts at cannibalism resulted in seasonally repeated mergers of some of our tiniest ancestors. Dry land became forested only after symbioses of algae and fungi evolved into plants. Since all living things are bathed by the same waters and atmosphere, all the inhabitants of Earth belong to a symbiotic union. Gaia, the finely tuned largest ecosystem of the Earth's surface, is just symbiosis as seen from space. Along the way, Margulis describes her initiation into the world of science and the early steps in the present revolution in evolutionary biology; the importance of species classification for how we think about the living world; and the way “academic apartheid” can block scientific advancement. Written with enthusiasm and authority, this is a book that could change the way you view our living Earth.
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Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology in the later decades of the 20th century and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully written view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and their interconnectedness of all life on the planet.
