Virtual Library

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.

Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history -- the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.

Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon and key figure of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president.

Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist for Swallow Me Whole).

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.

Many years ago, John Lewis and other student activists drew inspiration from the 1958 comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. Now, his own comics bring those days to life for a new audience, testifying to a movement whose echoes will be heard for generations.

The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century and Khubilai Khan’s founding of the Yuan dynasty brought together under one government people of different languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source.

Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter eighteen of the Yuan dianzhang, which has never before been translated into another language. Birge’s meticulously annotated translation clarifies the meaning of terms and passages, some in a hybrid Sino-Mongolian language, for specialists and general readers alike. The text includes court testimony—recorded in the vivid vernacular of people from all social classes—in lawsuits over adultery, divorce, rape, wife-selling, marriages of runaway slaves, and other conflicts. It brings us closer than any other source to the actual Mongolian speech of Khubilai and the great khans who succeeded him as they struggled to reconcile very different Mongol, Muslim, and Chinese legal traditions and confront the challenges of ruling a diverse polyethnic empire.

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases.

Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement. Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.

In Mozambique, where more than half of the national health care budget comes from foreign donors, NGOs and global health research projects have facilitated a dramatic expansion of medical services. At once temporary and unfolding over decades, these projects also enact deeply divergent understandings of what care means and who does it. In Medicine in the Meantime, Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint. Paying careful attention to the specific postcolonial and postsocialist context of Mozambique, McKay considers how the presence of NGOs and the governing logics of the global health economy have transformed the relations—between and within bodies, medical technologies, friends, kin, and organizations—that care requires and how such transformations pose new challenges for ethnographic analysis and critique.

En juin 2012, Samia Lakhdari, mon amie, ma sœur de combat, s’en est allée définitivement, comme elle a vécu: discrètement, sur la pointe des pieds. Je me suis rendue compte que j’enterrais dans les mêmes conditions une grande part, non seulement de moi-même, mais de nous-mêmes, génération née sous les ténèbres de l’occupation coloniale. J’eus l’impression d’enterrer aussi un pan fondamental de l’histoire de celles et ceux qui ont décidé de briser les chaînes cruellement oppressantes de la colonisation, payant de leur chair, de leur âme et de leur sang le tribut à la libération de notre peuple et à l’indépendance de notre pays. Je sais qu’il est de bon ton, aujourd’hui en 2013, de verser dans le révisionnisme, ne serait-ce qu’un soupçon, en adoptant une posture si appréciée par certains milieux français, qui consiste à regretter d’avoir déposé des bombes dans des lieux publics fréquentés par des civils européens. Posture à la faculté fondamentale d’occulter le problème central de la colonisation de peuplement et de faire passer les civils européens d’alors pour, au mieux des touristes de passage en Algérie et, au pire, des ayants droit “naturels” sur notre terre en lieu et place de ses enfants légitimes qu’étaient les indigènes. Mais je n’adopterai pas cette posture car j’ai horreur du mensonge et de son corollaire, le révisionnisme. Quels qu’ils soient et d’où qu’ils viennent. Je n’adopterai pas cette posture non plus car ni en 1956 ni en 1957 ni aujourd’hui ni jamais, nous n’avons regretté nos actes.

Born In 1934 in Tiaret, Zohra Drlf joined the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in Algiers during the war. After Algeria's independence, she became a lawyer and married FLN founding member Rabah Bitat (1925-2000), who was president of the National Popular Assembly from 1977 to 1990. Drif was a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1962 and, in 2002, was appointed vice-president of the Council of the Nation, which is the upper house of the Algerian parliament. Her memoir focuses on her youth, from her birth in a well-to-do, well­ educated Muslim family to her arrest in September 1957 during the Battle of Algiers. The publisher depicts Drif as a 'heroine of the war of national liberation' and highlights that she put a bomb in the Milk Bar, in the centre of Algiers, in September 1956. This terror attack killed four people and injured dozens of civilians.

How did a young Bundist activist fall so in love with France in the 1930s that she was willing to sacrifice her vocation as a painter, a student of Gromaire and familiar with Montparnasse, to share the life of her husband, a Russian emigrant who became a poultry farmer in the North? How, only just having been naturalized French, did she come to enlist at the start of the Second World War as a military nurse for the Red Cross to end up in the Camp d'Agde as an enemy alien? How did she come to take in a group of 44 Jewish children, organize their transfer to the Italian occupation zone, and build a home for them in Izieu? How did she become involved in the Resistance and ultimately assist returning deportees at the Hôtel Lutétia in Paris at the end of the war? And how, after all that, do she manage to rebuild your life as a painter?

Sabine Zlatin answers these question in her memoir. At the age of 85, she sat down to write her story from her pre-war life as a painter to the infamous events of April 6, 1944 when the Lyon Gestapo under the orders of Klaus Barbie raided the Izieu house arresting the 44 Jewish children and their carers, the majority of whom would be murdered in Auschwitz. The memoir also includes Zlatin's testimony from the Barbie trial and reflections from a former Izieu teacher and one student who survived.

Noted historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of the violent seventeenth-century conflict in northeastern America known as King Philip's War, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. DeLucia grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis, spanning the Northeast as well as the Atlantic world. She examines the war's effects on the everyday lives and collective mentalities of the region's diverse Native and Euro-American communities over the course of several centuries, focusing on persistent struggles over land and water, sovereignty, resistance, cultural memory, and intercultural interactions. An enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, this study reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life--to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.

Paris, octobre 1961 : à Richelieu-Drouot, la police s'oppose à des Algériens en colère. Thiraud, un petit prof d'histoire, a le tort de passer trop près de la manifestation qui fit des centaines de victimes. Cette mort ne serait jamais sortie de l'ombre si, vingt ans plus tard, un second Thiraud, le fils, ne s'était fait truffer de plomb, à Toulouse.