What is Black History? Did you know what blacks were in Cortez's crew in Mexico with Pizarro in Peru and Alvarado in Quito…that when Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean 30 black people were with him….that when Alarcon and Coronado conquered Mexico black people were with them too?Any misunderstandings between blacks and whites in today's society tend to stem from the misconceptions about blacks that have been allowed to thrive throughout the ages. The only way to help abolish stereotypes is...

Linguistics For Beginners is the first book to ever make the arcane labors of linguistics accessible to general readers. It begins with a lucid definition of language and proceeds to examine how it becomes the subject matter of linguistics. Key topics include the contrast between writing and speech and elementary lessons in analyses ranging from simple sounds to entire sentences. Absurd fictions such as Eskimos having hundreds of words for snow are exploded and the borderlands between ling...

One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. Collected in this volume are the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book are thoroughly researched and documented.Prison Town: Paying the Price tells the story of how the financing an...

Marshall McLuhan was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of the 20th century. He was so far ahead of his time that he predicted the future and offered a critique of human behavior in a media saturated world that is perhaps more valuable in today's Internet age than it was in his own time.McLuhan pioneered the study of Media unified Art and Science and warned us about the perils of a televised computerized famous-for-15-minutes social media world. A world where we would live in ...

In these wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis explores the codes-spiritual, cultural, and embodied-that people use to escape the limitation of their lives and enrich their experience of the world. These include Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods, Western occult and esoteric lore, postmodern theory and psychedelic science, as well as festival scenes such as Burning Man (of which Davis is the best-known chronicler). Articles on media technology further explore themes Davis...

Just outside Toronto, a 14-year-old Canadian girl was auctioned on the internet for men to purchase by the hour. A young woman was taken by slave traders from an African war zone to Edmonton to earn greater profits by exploiting her in prostitution. A gang called Wolfpack recruited teenagers in Quebec and sold them for sex to high-profile men in the community.The global problem of human trafficking is only beginning to be recognized in Canada, even though it has been hidden in plai...

A new edition of the feminist classic, with an all-new introduction exploring the role of backlash in the 2016 election and laying out a path forward for 2020 and beyondWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award • “Enraging, enlightening, and invigorating, Backlash is, most of all, true.”—NewsdayFirst published in 1991, Backlash made headlines and became a bestselling classic for its thoroughgoing debunking ...

Q. Why are there almost as many jokes about death as there are about sex?A. Because they both scare the pants off us.Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein first made a name for themselves with the outrageously funny New York Times bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar.... Now they turn their attention to the Big "D" and share the timeless wisdom of the great philosophers, theologians, psychotherapists, and wiseguys. F...

A Washington Post bestseller While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, the hidden plague of everyday violence silently undermines our best efforts to help the poor. Common violence like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, and police abuse has become routine and relentless. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in its path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts de...

The bestselling book revealing why Americans are so fearful, and why we fear the wrong things-now updated for the age of TrumpIn the age of Trump, our society is defined by fear. Indeed, three out of four Americans say they feel more fearful today than they did only a couple decades ago. But are we living in exceptionally perilous times? In his bestselling book The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner demonstrates that it is our perception of danger...

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seem...

Humans have been meditating on the Moon since the beginning of our time on earth. As long as there has been anything we could call astrology, it has been central to all theories of celestial influence. But why do astrologers pay so little attention to its phases? In these pages, Steven Forrest, bestselling author of The Inner Sky, shows how we have been blinded to the lunar phases by a set of cultural attitudes now drifting into extinction. He demonstrates that our Celtic ancestor...