Virtual Library

12 Million Black Voices, first published in 1941, combines Wright's prose with startling photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam from the Security Farm Administration files compiled during the Great Depression. The photographs include works by such giants as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein. From crowded, rundown farm shacks to Harlem storefront churches, the photos depict the lives of black people in 1930s America--their misery and weariness under rural poverty, their spiritual strength, and their lives in northern ghettos. Wright's accompanying text eloquently narrates the story of these 90 pictures and delivers a powerful commentary on the origins and history of black oppression in this country.

1959年3月10日，拉薩數萬民眾包圍達賴喇嘛的夏宮羅布林卡，阻止他按照原定計劃前往西藏軍區司令部觀看文藝演出。隨後民眾集會遊行，喊出了要求解放軍撤出西藏，要求西藏獨立的口號。那天在拉薩發生的事，史稱「1959年拉薩事件」。事件導致未滿24歲的西藏政教領袖，時任全國人大常委會副委員長、西藏自治區籌委會主任的第十四世達賴喇嘛丹增嘉措率家人和噶廈政府部分主要官員，於17日深夜離開羅布林卡，經過兩周跋涉，翻越喜馬拉雅山，前往印度尋求政治庇護。

本書是以 細緻入微的研究以及公正的立場揭示「1959年拉薩事件」歷史真相的開創性作品。

On March 10th, 1959, tens of thousands of people surrounded Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's summer palace in Lhasa, preventing him from attending a prescheduled theater performance at the headquarters of the Tibetan Military Region. Soon afterwards, the people carried out a rally and demonstrations, shouting slogans calling for PLA withdrawal from Tibet and Tibetan independence. The events of that day later became known as the "1959 Lhasa Incident." The incident spurred the not yet twenty four-year-old Tibetan religious leader Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, co-chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, and director of the Tibet Autonomous Region Planning Committee to flee Norbulingka late at night on the 17th. After a two-week journey across the Himalayas, the Dalai Lama, his family members, and some Kashag government officials sought political asylum in India.

A Call for Heresy discovers unexpected common ground in one of the most inflammatory issues of the twenty-first century: the deepening conflict between the Islamic world and the United States. Moving beyond simplistic answers, Anouar Majid argues that the Islamic world and the United States are both in precipitous states of decline because, in each, religious, political, and economic orthodoxies have silenced the voices of their most creative thinkers—the visionary nonconformists, radicals, and revolutionaries who are often dismissed, or even punished, as heretics.

The United States and contemporary Islam share far more than partisans on either side admit, Majid provocatively argues, and this “clash of civilizations” is in reality a clash of competing fundamentalisms. Illustrating this point, he draws surprising parallels between the histories and cultures of Islam and the United States and their shortsighted suppression of heresy (zandaqa, in Arabic), from Muslim poets and philosophers like Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroës) to the freethinker Thomas Paine, and from Abu Bakr Razi and Al-Farabi to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. He finds bitter irony in the fact that Islamic culture is now at war with a nation whose ideals are losing ground to the reactionary forces that have long condemned Islam to stagnation.

The solution, Majid concludes, is a long-overdue revival of dissent. Heresy is no longer a contrarian’s luxury, for only through encouraging an engaged and progressive intellectual tradition can the nations reverse their decline and finally work together for global justice and the common good of humanity.

This book is concerned with the history of the idea of human rights. It offers a fresh approach that puts aside familiar questions such as 'Where do human rights come from?' and 'When did human rights begin?' for the sake of looking into connections between debates about the rights of man and developments within the history of capitalism. The focus is on England, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, a heated controversy over the rights of man coincided with the final enclosure of common lands and the momentous changes associated with early industrialisation. Tracking back still further to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about dispossession, resistance and rights, the book reveals a forgotten tradition of thought about central issues in human rights, with profound implications for their prospects in the world today.

Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society, and when she falls for no-account Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves.

In 1982, Evelyn's daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life.

Jackie's son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn't survive the storm. Fresh out of a four-month stint for drug charges, T.C. decides to start over--until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal.

For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.

Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter--buttressed by FDR's "Four Freedoms" and the legacies of World War I--redefined human rights and America's vision for the world.
By analyzing the interaction of ideas, individuals, and institutions that transformed American foreign policy--and Americans' view of themselves--Borgwardt illuminates the broader history of modern human rights, trade and the global economy, collective security, and international law. This book captures a lost vision of the American role in the world.

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United States there are calls for “sharia bans” in the courts, in western Europe legal limitations have been imposed on mosques and the wearing of headscarves, and in the Arab Middle East conflicts between secularist old guards and Islamist revolutionaries persist—suggesting that previously unsteady coexistences are transforming into outright hostilities.

Jeffrey Redding’s exploration of India’s non-state system of Muslim dispute resolution—known as the dar-ul-qaza system and commonly referred to as “Muslim courts” or “shariat courts”—challenges conventional narratives about the inevitable opposition between Islamic law and secular forms of governance, demonstrating that Indian secular law and governance cannot work without the significant assistance of non-state Islamic legal actors.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.