Nonfiction

Dark sky rising : Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow

Henry Louis Gates

973.00496 /Gates
History, Nonfiction, Black History

"This is a story about America and the shaping of its democratic values during the Reconstruction era, one of our country's most pivotal and misunderstood chapters. In this stirring account of the Civil War, emancipation, and the struggle for rights and reunion that followed, one of the premier US scholars delivers a book that is as illuminating as it is timely. Real-life accounts of heroism, grit, betrayal, and bravery drive this book's narrative, spanning America's history from 1861 to 1915 and drawing parallels with today. Topics include the destruction of slavery, the Reconstruction Amendments, and African American resilience in times of racial unrest. Notable figures cited throughout include Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten, W.E.B. Du Bois, and more. Here, you will come face-to-face with America's challenge to create a society in which black and white citizens could, after a violent civil war, find a lasting peace without new lines of inequality and separation being drawn. The people and events of that noble experiment, and its violent overthrow and eventual undermining in the Jim Crow era, are central to this story. In introducing them to young readers, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., shares a history that remains vitally relevant to the challenges of our own time."--Dust jacket.

Added by Melody

What's your pronoun? : beyond he & she

Dennis E. Baron

425.55 /Baron
Nonfiction

"The story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular they. Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are suddenly sparking debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Colleges ask students to declare their pronouns; corporate conferences print nametags with space for people to add their pronouns; email signatures sport pronouns along with names and titles. Far more than a byproduct of campus politics or culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are in fact nothing new. Renowned linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, demonstrating that Shakespeare used singular they; that women evoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women's rights invoked the same word to assert that he did not include she), and that self-appointed language experts have been coining new gender pronouns, not just hir and zie but hundreds more, like thon, ip, and em, for centuries. Based on Baron's own empirical research, What's Your Pronoun? tells the untold story of gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns"--

I have an editing background and I may or may not have once a subscription to a publication solely about copyediting. Sentence structure matters! Words matter! But you know what? Social customs change, and rules are there so we can break them--or, rather, *evolve* into our better, more complete selves. This book is an excellent guide for anyone curious about how the English language is evolving to be more inclusive. -Melody

Prelude to bruise : poetry

Saeed Jones

811.6 /Jones
Poetry, Nonfiction

Added by Melody

Go ahead in the rain : notes to A Tribe Called Quest

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

781.66092 /Tribe
Nonfiction

How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre bending as the rap group itself. Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast/West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that, like the low end, the bass, are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

Added by Melody