Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Social Activists

The basis for the Academy Award(R)-winning movie
"A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's 'many thousand gone' who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation." -- Saturday Review Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841. He spent the next 12 harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. After regaining his freedom in 1853, Northup decided to publish this gripping autobiographical account of his...

This is a book about American intellectuals as would-be social reformers and what happens to them in the arena of practical politics. Specifically, it examines the lives of ten highly idealistic Christian socialist and anarchist intellectuals of the 1890s who were profoundly influenced -- indeed inspired -- by the prophetic social messages and exemplary lives of Tolstoy, Mazzini, and Ruskin. The ten Americans -- including ministers, journalists, professors, and poets -- were constantly thwarted in their efforts to apply the Golden Rule and the ethics of Jesus not only to the socioeconomic...

When the private papers of Millard Fillmore, thought to have been destroyed in 1889, were discovered they proved to include a large number of letters to Fillmore from Dorothea Dix, the renowned crusader for the humane treatment of the insane. Almost simultaneously, the letters of Fillmore to Dix, which had lain forgotten in a private collection since 1887, became available.

Thus overnight a correspondence of more than a hundred and fifty letters, spanning nearly twenty years, opened new perspectives upon two prominent Americans whose friendship was known to few during their lifetimes...

The Mexican border state of Chihuahua and its city Juarez have become notorious the world over as hotbeds of violence. Drug cartel battles and official corruption result in more murders annually in Chihuahua than in wartorn Afghanistan. Thanks to a culture of impunity, 97 percent of the killings in Juarez go unsolved. Despite a climate of fear, a small group of human rights activists, exemplified by the Chihuahua lawyer and organizer Lucha Castro, works to identify the killers and their...

Shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

In the decades since his execution by the Nazis in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, theologian, and anti-Hitler conspirator, has become one of the most widely read and inspiring Christian thinkers of our time. With unprecedented archival access and definitive scope, Charles Marsh captures the life of this remarkable man who searched for the goodness in his religion against the backdrop of a steadily darkening Europe. From his...

Contrary to popular notions, today's LGBT movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Long before Stonewall, there was Franklin Kameny (1925-2011), one of the most significant figures in the gay rights movement. Beginning in 1958, he encouraged gay people to embrace homosexuality as moral and healthy, publicly denounced the federal government for excluding homosexuals from federal employment, openly fought the military's ban against gay men and women, debated psychiatrists who depicted homosexuality as a mental disorder, identified test cases to advance civil liberties through...

But in the pages of this book, you won't read about a man who felt sorry for himself or who wallowed in the misery of his sufferings. Rather, you will hear the true stories of believers whose faith in Jesus Christ took preeminence in their lives and who allowed nothing, not even a Communist government, to...