Central America Books

there are books that you will read in your lifetime,that you think are really good and there are books you will read that you think are one of the best books you will ever read and know you will read again and again.
this book is the latter.charles clements has probably lived the life of several people within a short space of time,from being a pilot in the vietnam war to being a quaker doctor in the middle of the war zone in el salvador.this book explains the life of the people of el salvador and how foreign governments can dictate the annihilation of a country,just because they are afraid of the threat of communism.this book will stir you to become more aware of how governments manipulate and gives you one of the best actual accounts of life in el salvador and how the people lived,loved and fought to protect their families and way of life.

I read this book 3 years ago while travelling in Central America and was consumed by it. This is a war story that is so very human that it will shock you out of your comfort zone. It's one man's account of the suffering he witnessed in El Salvador, but it's also a story about the motives behind this peasant uprising and the deadly manner in which it was crushed in the name of democracy.

I read this book while attending college, it was part of a Latin American Government class. It was the kind of book that Reagan and his cronies did not want anybody to read. A book that showed the humanity and compassion of the so-called "communist guerillas" that were attempting to overthrow the "freedom-loving" dictatorship that ruled El Salvador. The story is told in such a descriptive and wonderful way by Dr. Charles Clements. If anything, this book demonstrates that truth comes from actual observers and not from politicians with crooked agendas. Dr. Clements tried to open Americans' eyes to the reality that existed in El Salvador at this time, while Reagan and the media attempted to distort that reality.

The outstanding feature of this book is the style of the writing. The sentences are short and technical terms are expressed in every day Language. For more abstract concepts solid every day examples are used to explain the concepts. Many concepts which I have struggled with for years was made clear in this book. If you are interested in taking charge of your 401(k) account,I would highly recommend this book.

This book is an excellent resource for those wishing to understand that mystical employee benefit of the 90's, the 401(k). It inspired me to finally understand mine, and help me make better use of the available options. I recommend it to anyone whose company offers a 401(k)

James Mohr's "Abortion in America" is a breath of fresh air in the abortion debate. Scholarly, unbiased, and betraying no hint whatsoever of any kind of agenda -- pro or con -- regarding abortion policy, the book is nevertheless revelatory concerning the development of abortion law in this country. From the colonial and early republican period, when abortion was perfectly legal (partly because doctors, hampered by inadequate medical knowledge, -- the difference between a pregnancy and some kind of uterine "stoppage" was unclear -- frequently administered medications that caused abortions) to the 1890s, when virtually every state had a system of laws prohibiting abortions, the story is capably told. And the truth ought to startle anyone who thinks religious activism was in any way responsible for the late 19th-century wave of anti-abortion legislation. I'll leave it to prospective readers to discover who or what was actually responsible, and how self-interest (as opposed to an interest in the unborn) played a crucial role. An eye-opener, and an important read for people for either side of the debate.

Mohr's groundbreaking work is a history of abortion in the United States from the colonial days until the present (as of the late 1970s). What is fascinating about this book is how the medical establishment railed against the increased use of abortion in the 1800s but became among its foremost advocates a century later. Mohr also shows the reader how legalizing abortion in recent years was not a result of lax morals but rather was a return to the past.

This is a brief book, but it is one of the very finest books on this controversial issue.

An excellent job of narrating the recovery of lost material from existing documentation. The footnotes are well researched. The topic is fascinating, and the insights of the editors very useful. However, I would have liked to see an additional index with entry using English terms as well as the existing index of Taino words.

In addition, in analysis of a culture so intimately linked and so knowledgeable of nature as the Tainos, one should also take into account biological reality. For instance, it seems clear to a biologist that Mácocael, "he of the lidless eyes:' page 6 of the text may well be the great rainbow boa, Epicrates spp., Ma-ja, the great snake, since this serpent, like most boas, has lidless eyes.

An excellent job of narrating the recovery of lost material from existing documentation. The footnotes are well researched. The topic is fascinating, and the insights of the editors very useful. However, I would have liked to see an additional index with entry using English terms as well as the existing index of Taino words.

In addition, in analysis of a culture so intimately linked and so knowledgeable of nature as the Tainos, one should also take into account biological reality. For instance, it seems clear to a biologist that Mácocael, "he of the lidless eyes:' page 6 of the text may well be the great rainbow boa, Epicrates spp., Ma-ja, the great snake, since this serpent, like most boas, has lidless eyes.

Excellent book! It has pictures and a bio on todays black artists. My favorite would have to be Ben Jones, my old college professor! lol www.Gallery07002.com

Samella Lewis has updated and further developed her definitive guide on African-American Art. As a former student instructed on the subject with her first edition of this book as our class text, I can definitively say that this book provides a solid understanding of the different art movements and a variety of examples of the works. Also from the perspective of a young museum professional who has worked with African-American art collections, I highly recommend this volume as a foundation of basic knowledge on the subject.

African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is designed to help students in a survey course gain an understanding of that struggle. It introduces the concepts, milestones, and significant figures of African American history. What is outstanding is the way it engages the reader in viewing history through the lens of many biographies and through the perspectives of people who lived those struggles.

We get the the stories of the lives of both the illustrious and the ordinary, as well as the public and the private world of the people who make up this grand saga.

These interwoven stories clearly show that, in every part of the country, at every level of society, African Americans refused to allow their condition to crush them. Instead, they were shakers and shapers of their own world insofar as this was possible. That African Americans often did not succeed in their plans or could not fully realize their hopes does not diminish their strivings.

This is an excellent introduction to African American history that many families should consider also having in their home library.

African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, Single Volume Edition by Clayborne Carson (Longman) Alternate editions [Volume One Chapters One through Eleven; Volume Two Chapters Eleven Through Twenty-One] Excerpt: Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it maybe a physical one, or it maybe both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. -Frederick Douglass
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is designed to help students in the survey course gain an understanding of that struggle. It introduces the concepts, milestones, and significant figures of African American history. Inasmuch as that history is grounded in struggle-in the consistent and insistent call to the United States to make good on constitutional promises made to all its citizens-this book is also an American history text. Hence, the milestones of mainstream American history, economy, politics, arts and letters are interwoven in its pages.
But African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom seeks to do something more. It engages the reader in viewing history through the lens of many biographies and through the perspectives of people who lived those struggles to ensure, in the words of Langston Hughes' famous poem, that "America Will Be." This unique biographical approach to African American history positions African American lives at the center of the narrative and as the basis of analysis.
BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom tells the stories of the lives of both the illustrious (abolitionist Martin Delany) and the ordinary (planter Isaiah Montgomery), the public and the private perspectives of those who shaped the African American story. Some individuals are famous for their specific contributions; other individuals are representative of a larger idea, a concept of a people who have inhabited the American continent for more than half a millennium.
Throughout the book we examine the struggles of African Americans to define their own identities, the development of nationalist ideas and rhetoric, Americans' struggle with the concept of race, and the growth of the politics of race from the Republican Party to the Rainbow Coalition. Wherever possible, we enliven and give authenticity to the story through the words of contemporary participants. With all that, we keep the story concise, fast-paced, and compelling.
Within these pages, we try to capture the essence of the African American experience. The book presents African American voices; it sees history through African American eyes. The events and the themes around which these lives were organized are defined so as to impose order on the often disorderly past and to interpret that past as modern historical research has revealed it. The biographical approach both guides the story and animates the history In each chapter, individual African Americans are the pivot points that provide a window on the historical changes of their generation. Life stories capture the rush of events that envelop individuals and illuminate the momentous decisions that, collectively, frame the American past and present.
While humanizing history, the biographical approach has another important advantage: It is an antidote to the poisonous notion of historical inevitability. Too often, expressions such as the sweep of history, the transit of civilization, manifest destiny, and the march of progress plant the idea that history is inexorable, unalterable, and foreordained-beyond the capacity of men and women to change. That idea has been used to justify a winner's history-an approach that diminishes the full humanness of those who were captured and traded as slaves. Books with a winner's history approach also work to absolve those who traded in slaves and profited from their labor. To promote the understanding that no individual is forever trapped within iron circumstances beyond his or her ability to alter, we ground every chapter in the experience of people rather than forces.
The interwoven human stories in this textbook demonstrate that in every age, in every part of the country, at every level of society, African Americans refused to allow history to crush them. Instead, they were shakers and shapers of their own world insofar as this was possible. Whether in the small space of plantation quarters or Harlem walkups, or criss-crossing a nation, or calling for the unity of Africans dispossessed and dispersed around the globe, African Americans have shaped their world even as they contested and transformed their subordinate roles in American society. That often they did not succeed in their plans or could not fully realize their hopes does not diminish their strivings. It does not alter the fact that for many, nothing was passively accepted; everything was contested or negotiated. The struggle for dignity and respect is part of the human condition. It has been no different for a dispossessed African American minority determined to transcend the contempt of their fellow Americans.
Just as African American lives are inarguably part of the long process by which Americans have strived to achieve the promise of the national motto E pluribus unum-from the many, one-so too African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom is not a story set in stone. It is the product of our constantly changing understandings of the past, new insights about historical possibilities, and new historical research. In that ongoing effort, African American history has achieved breadth and depth in recent decades, indeed has become one of the most vibrant components of American history, reshaping the way we understand everything from the American economy to innovations in science, politics, and the arts. Drawing on the last half-century of recast historical narrative, African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom crafts a new synthesis that not only enriches our understanding of the black experience in America but alters our conception of American history in the whole.
COVERAGE AND ORGANIZATION
In African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, the distinctive people and events of American history are all here: the Europeans' first encounter with new people and a new environment, the American Revolution and its shaping of humanitarian ideals, the War of 1812, the Missouri Compromise, sectional conflicts, wars from the Civil War
through this century's war against terrorism, cultural trends from the resistance poetry of revolutionary-era Phillis Wheatley through modern-day hip hop.
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom corn-prises twenty-one chapters. Chapters 1-7 explore the period up to 1830, when most Africans in North America were enslaved. The book begins, as all human history begins, in Africa with ancient history and the rise of empires in West and Central Africa during the period American and western historians think of as the Middle Ages. European contact and the growth of the slave trade are followed by an analysis of the new conditions of slavery in the Americas. To understand how Africans were not all enslaved in the same ways and in the same conditions, the chapters treat the formation of notions about race and how they figured in the descent into slavery in different zones of European settlement-French, Dutch, and Spanish as well as English-in the Americas. The galvanizing effect of the American Revolution and the decades thereafter during which free black people in the North and in the South built families, founded churches, forged friendships and communities, and struggled for autonomy and dignity are central themes.
Chapters 8-14 examine pivotal junctures in African American history that parallel the American focus on reform and nationality. The 1830s marked the first years when the majority of black Americans were not forced immigrants but rather born on American soil. Echoing the religious reawakening that undergirded both abolitionism and a vigorous defense of slavery, slave and free African Americans alike claimed their voice in an international antebellum debate about the future of American democracy. Then, through a long and merciless Civil War, the end of slavery, and the South's attempt to recreate the essence of slavery, black Americans persisted in holding forth, before white Americans and the world, the guarantees of equality and citizenship built into the new constitutional amendments. The post-Civil War dispersal of newly freed African Americans to every corner of North America shows how, in the face of a still-hostile white America that abandoned Reconstruction, black people built families, communities, and viable economic lives; established churches, mutual aid and literary societies, and businesses; and launched schools and publishing ventures as they sought to transform themselves from slaves to soldiers and citizens and to wrest equality and justice from white America.
Chapters 15-21 address African American life in mod-ern America. We devote attention to the increasing diversity of African Americans and how-during world wars, the Great Depression, and other momentous national and inter-national transformations-they struggled for full participation in a society still marred by racist attitudes and practices. Throughout twentieth-century scientific, technological, and
sources, visual material, historical essays, and personal interpretations.
Visual History: Each chapter includes a complement of graphic materials and illustrations-maps, charts, photographs, lithographs, and paintings-that provide a visual window on the past. These visual materials are intended to unfold an additional dimension of the narrative, reinforcing the student's sense of seeing history as participants saw it. To sharpen complex or subtle concepts, tables efficiently convey a sequence of events or milestones-for example, judicial decisions, legislative acts, and protest movement flashpoints.
economic changes, one theme permeates African American strategies for securing justice and equal opportunity: the ongoing struggle for a positive sense of identity amidst racism and destructive racial stereotypes. Whether in fighting the nation's wars; helping build the modern economy; adding to the explosion of cultural creativity through innovations in music, art, film, dance, and literature; or emerging on the political stage at the local, state, and national level, African Americans in the last century are portrayed as the principal innovators of the nation's most important liberation movement.
SPECIAL FEATURES AND PEDAGOGY
Complementing the multitude of stories connecting African American lives and American history, this book has several features we consider essential elements of a braided analytic narrative.
First Persons: Each chapter contains several primary documents called "First Person" that bring authentic firsthand accounts from the past to the page. These written and spoken words help us comprehend, as no modern paraphraser can do, how African Americans such as Olaudah Equiano, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Pauli Murray understood their world and sought to transform it. A headnote puts each primary document in context. Many documents end with a reference to the book's companion website (www.ablongman.com/ carson/documents), encouraging students to view a longer version of the document online.
Timelines: Timelines help students fix the most significant developments in African American history as they are framed in the larger, more familiar American story. These are positioned at the beginning of each chapter directly following an opening vignette.
Chapter-opening Vignettes: Focusing on personal stories such as the rebelliousness of Venture Smith or the wartime experience of First Lieutenant Thomas Edward Jones, these vignettes draw students into the chapter period and herald the chapter's events and themes.
Conclusions: A summary of the main ideas and events of each chapter, and a look ahead to the next, can be found in the Conclusion.
Further Reading: At the end of each chapter are suggestions for further reading. Here we provide a sampling, rather than an exhaustive list, of fresh histories as well as classics, engaging autobiographies and historical novels students can explore for primary

The continuing story of the Cherokees after their arrival in present day Oklahoma. A story of the conflicts both within and outside of the Cherokee Nation. The story of how the Cherokees battled to maintain their sovereignty and ultimately failed. Meticulously researched by McLoughlin through primary sources, an excellent history for anyone interested in Native American or Cherokee history. An typical example of what happened to all tribes in America.

This book, as far as I know, is the only one that explores the fascinating history of the Cherokees after they reached Oklohoma. We all know of the 'trail of tears' where the cherokees were removed from Georgia and forced to march to Oklohoma. This book tells the great story of their attempts ot civilize the land. How they built homes how they bought slaves and how they fought with neighbooring indians(who looked like savages to the new americanized Cherokee). The Cherokees fought in the civil war and even fought civil wars among themselves. This book details the hatred of the pure blood cherokees for their brethen who seemed more white and scottish then the others. The cherokee nation then was oborbed into the state of oklohoma when the Indian territory was aboloshed. This is an extraordinary tail of a hitherto unknown american story about one of americas most talked about, but seldom understood and studied, indian tribes, the noble civilized cultured Cherokee(who so many people claim to be descended from that a modern Indian joke goes "what do you get when you have 40 Cherokees in one room? One full blooded Indian").

This is a really good piece of work. I'm a maritime history buff and I enjoyed it a lot. If you're at all interested in the early history of the New England states or especially interested in Nantucket and the way people there made their fortunes, I'd give this book a try. It's a good history that reads like a good novel in places. Highly recommended.

Mawer's splendid "Ahab's Trade" tells the incredible story of South Seas (i.e. Pacific) whaling during the 19th and 20th centuries. The principal character in this book does not have a particular name; the names themselves shift from voyage to voyage - but the constant heroic icon that keeps appearing is the longboat's crewman; the sailor who ventures out onto the high seas in little but a glorified rowboat, harpoon in hand, ready to do battle with a beast that could easily smash the boat to bits. Whatever you think of whaling, you can't deny the bravery of these men.

Mawer does not stop with a strict rendition of whaling, however: he takes the opportunity to share with the reader many a story about the Pacific in general during this fateful period, from the discovery of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn island, to the "ExEx" expedition of the 1830s (recently given its own entire history), to the exploits of Confederate raiders during the 1860s. The narrative ends with the (comparatively recent) international ban on whaling - a ban that Mawer does not entirely embrace. Immaculately researched and superbly written.

This book contains a great list of places to stay and eat with prices. Some of my favorite sections of book include the following: Listing of Best Unspoiled Small Towns, which include Kodiak, Petersburg, and Cordova; Listing of Strange Comunity Events which include Cordova's Ice Worm Festival, Fairbanks' Midnight Sun Baseball Game nad Nomes Polar Bear Swim/Bathtub Race. If you are going to Alaska's number 1 destination, Denali National Park, make sure you pick up a copy of Discovering Denali.

I was planning a cruise to Alaska. I chose "Fodor's 2001 Alaska" as a guidebook and was so impressed, I purchased two more of them for my cruise travelmates. This book went with me wherever I traveled in the "land of the midnight sun". Not only did Fodor's guidebook describe the cruise ships to the inth, but all of the activities, etc. Every bit of the text was accurate to my experiences. This was my first cruise, and my first trip to Alaska. I found this book to be indispensible! The data on Alaska, the facts, the figures, the special places to see, things to do, walks, hikes, eats, animals, and people...all here in crisp detail for you to enjoy. Upon my return to the "lower 48", I even narrated my Alaska photo albums with information I retrieved from this book. History, indiginous peoples, it's all here. Do get this book if you are thinking of going to Alaska, or returning to Alaska. All text is up to date, with maps, etc. Excellent resource! From the Inside Passage to Denali National Park I traveled, and I learned much more about this great land we call Alaska because of Fodor's book. I am now planning on going back to this beautiful place in great part due to reading this guidebook.

Ian Graham's intelligent and accessible biography of the great Mayanist Alfred Maudslay is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of archaeology in the Maya region. Graham helps you see the difficulty and cost, both financial and personal, that this kind of obsession creates, making Maudslay's work that much more compelling. The only downside (smile) to reading this book is that you may be forced (forced!) as I was, to find a decent and expensive copy of the Maudslay archaeology volumes of Biologia Centrali-Americana, which becomes a must-have, once you've read Graham.

A long overdue biography of the great mayanist traveller, explorer and early archaeologist. Graham does a good job of weaving together information from personal interviews, letters, journals and notes. I found it a highly readable and informative account of his life and accomplishments. It lends a human touch to a name which comes up over and over in reading on the ancient Maya. It also provides a fascinating early travelogue of central america 50 years after Stephens and Catherwood. Graham has a keen appreciation of the challenges Maudslay faced in his self appointed task of recording as many mayan monuments and inscriptions as he could, a career path which indeed echoes his own.