Showing results for title "This Land" in History

A timely argument for why the US and the West would benefit from accepting more immigrants. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention and a literary polemic of the highest order.

This Noble Land is Michener's most personal statement about America, an examination of the issues that threaten to fragment and undermine the nation - racial conflict, the widening gulf between rich and poor, the decline of education, the inadequacies of our health care system - as well as a thought-provoking prescription for sustaining our "outstanding success". First published shortly before Michener's death, This Noble Land stands as a wake-up call for a troubled era, infused with the wisdom and passion of a lifetime.

In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. His goal was to secure weapons and start a slave rebellion. The raid was a failure, but it galvanized the nation and sparked the Civil War. Still one of the most controversial figures in American history, John Brown's actions raise interesting questions about unsanctioned violence that can be justified for a greater good.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the listener on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.

The award-winning documentary podcast This Land is back for season 2. Host Rebecca Nagle reports on how the far right is using Native children to attack American Indian tribes and advance a conservative agenda.

Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on elements of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth - a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World.

On 12th December 2019, the left died. That at least was the view of much of Britain's media and political establishment, who saw the electoral defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party as the damning repudiation of everything it stood for. Yet, just over four years previously, the election of Corbyn as Labour leader seemed like a sea-change in politics: reanimating not just a party in apparently terminal decline but a country adrift, with a transformative vision based on a more just, more equal society and economy.

February, 1940. After a decade of worldwide depression, World War II had begun in Europe and Asia. With Germany on the march and Japan at war with China, the global crisis was in a crescendo. America's top songwriter, Irving Berlin, had captured the nation's mood a little more than a year before with his patriotic hymn "God Bless America."

During the spring and summer of 2021, global news reports were filled with the impending US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. At best, it would be viewed as a stalemate, with an orderly transition to a stable, US-backed Afghan government. At worse, it would be looked upon as two decades of futile war, ending with a shameful retreat that left the county at the mercy of a ruthless Taliban regime. What went wrong?

Reporting from Jerusalem for The New York Times and Fox News respectively, Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, witnessed a decades-old conflict transformed into a completely new war. The West has learned a lot about asymmetrical war in the past decade. At the same time, many strategists have missed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become one of them. This book shows the importance of applying these hard-won lessons to the longest running, most closely watched occupation and uprising in the world.

Plymouth, Devon, 1501. Luke Kendal, the long-awaited son of Elizabeth and John, grows up under the loving watch of his mother and stepfather, but soon he, too, must face his trials. Irresistibly drawn to the wild Isobel, he risks all in his secret rendezvous with her. Battling with himself, he maintains the romance is only temporary, but any easing of his conscience is shattered by the revelation that Isobel is with child. Luke Kendal must make a decision: desert Isobel and render his child a bastard or defile the family honour.

What makes a home? What makes a refugee? As allegedly record-breaking numbers of migrants attempt to reach Britain and public conversation becomes, often, poisonous, Island Refuge is a powerful account of what has come before and what has been learned by it. Almost every time, we see when we look back, Britain has not been an island refuge from the world, but an island refuge for the world. Not a country burdened by refugees, but instead transformed and strengthened by them.

Throughout the stories here is information on how places, cities, and states got their names. However, questions arise because Native American tribes of the day didn’t yet have a written alphabet, and none of those came along until Sequoyah invented one in 1821, one that was actually more of a syllabary with symbols that stood for consonant/vowel sequences and could make words, basically just a writing system.

In this account, Gottlieb Mittelberger reveals the plight of poor German families who migrated to America in the 18th century. It was normal at the time for poor Europeans to fund their journey to the New World by agreeing to a period of indentured servitude. Yet what Mittleberger observed was more akin to slavery: workers were auctioned off upon arrival with no formal contract. This enlightening record reveals a darker side to early American history.