Bøger udgivet af Beacon Press

Together in one volume, Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walking, is writing that defines our distinctly American relationship to nature.

Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfictionThe first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to ';Publick Universal Friend,' refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized ';female marriage.' And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP's magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this groundbreaking book. Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, A Queer History of the United States is more than a ';who's who' of queer history: it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, noted scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and history. A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American historythe ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the nineteenth century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is today. At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers appreciate just how queer America really is.

One of the world's great meditation teachers offers thirty-four guided exercises that will bring both beginning and experienced practitioners into closer touch with their bodies, their inner selves, their families, and the world. Compassionate and wise, Thich Nhat Hanh's healing words help us acknowledge and dissolve anger and separation by illuminating the way toward the miracle of mindfulness.

This first collection of Judith Plaskow's essays and short writings traces her scholarly and personal journey from her early days as a graduate student through her pioneering contributions to both feminist theology and Jewish feminism to her recent work in sexual ethics.Accessibly organized into four sections, the collection begins with several of Plaskow's foundational essays on feminist theology, including one previously unavailable in English. Section II addresses her nuanced understanding of oppression and includes her important work on anti-Judaism in Christian feminism. Section III contains a variety of short and highly readable pieces that make clear Plaskow's central role in the creation of Jewish feminism, including the essential "e;Beyond Egalitarianism."e; Finally, section IV presents her writings on the significance of sexual ethics to the larger project of transforming Judaism.Intelligently edited with the help of Rabbi Donna Berman, and including pieces never before published, The Coming of Lilith is indispensable for religious studies students, fans of Plaskow's work, and those pursuing a Jewish education.

A love letter to queer of color theory and how it has helped the author to discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work towards liberationMarcos Gonsalez found his greatest source of joy when he encountered queer theory in college. As they put it, "queers and college go together like peanut butter and jelly," and for them, this was especially true. Seeing himself reflected in the work José Esteban Muñoz was life-changing: Muñoz's theory of disidentification empowered Gonsalez to reclaim their Latinx and queer identities--and inspired him to push back against the largely-white monolith of queer theory.In the sophisticated yet intimately disarming prose of In Theory, Darling, Gonsalez takes his copy of Disidentifications to the gay bar, to the classroom, to their childhome and beyond, inviting us to go along with him as he limns the queerness of reality TV, mourns the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre, searches for their uncle in Paris Is Burning, looks for Muñoz's legacy in the streets of New York, and situates themself in the lineage of the queer elders who have come before him.Conversational yet deeply analytical, intimate yet wide-ranging, youthful yet sophisticated, Gonsalez's essays crackle with intellectual energy--and remind us just how life-giving theory can be.

"A queer Black feminist debunks the myth of rainbow solidarity, repositioning Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ people at the forefront of queer pasts, presents, and futures"--

From the host of The David Pakman Show comes a vital look at how right-wing extremism has led to the fall of critical thinking and rise of reactionary politics—and what we can do about it to save our democracyKnown for providing incisive progressive political analysis without being dogmatic, popular radio and podcast host David Pakman delves into the vicious cycle of reactionary political ideology.If there is one thing the 2024 election cycle showed us, it’s how the right-wing has benefited and capitalized on disinformation and the polarization of US politics. Critical thinking and media literacy are on a rapid decline, and our republic is unable to agree upon a shared set of facts.Infused with Pakman’s signature pragmatic insight, The Echo Machine is not just a critique nor an instruction manual, but an invitation to think, question, and understand how we got to this point and what we can do to mend our broken system. Deeply researched and accessibly written, readers will learn:The underlying issues with political discourse in America today.How these issues have led to the intellectual race to the bottom.Practical ways to improve discourse through improving critical thinking, media literacy, and public education.Examples from real-world debates and discussions to better understand the impact of these issues on our democracy and why leftism is the best path forward.Pakman calmly cuts through the alarmist noise to inspire readers across the political spectrum to break out of our toxic political echo chambers and ultimately save our democracy.

"A young South Asian American woman's story of reconnecting with her identity, family, and heritage through sustainable farming"--

A tale of 2 NYC affordable housing co-ops’ struggle over privatization, public goods, and the future of American housingThe American Dream of homeownership is becoming an American Delusion. As renters seek an escape from record-breaking rent hikes, first-time buyers find that skyrocketing interest rates and historically low inventory leave them with scant options for an affordable place to live. With home valued more than ever as a commodity, even social housing programs meant to insulate families from cut-throat markets are under threat—sometimes by residents themselves.In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.With a deft hand for mapping personal histories atop the greater housing crisis, Tarleton explores housing as a public good, movements for tenant rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and questions of race and class to lay bare competing visions of what ownership means, what homes are for, and what neighbors owe each other.

A violence prevention expert helps women and other targets of gender-based violence discern fact from fiction, improve their personal safety, and support social changePersonal safety shouldn’t mean living in fear, nor should it come at the expense of political progress.There are two kinds of safety choices: those that disrupt power structures and those that leave them unquestioned. Safety decisions that challenge power inequities require more fortitude, but they also lead to real change.Every time we alter our lives to avoid violence, we are making a political statement, whether we intend to or not. Crossing the street to avoid a homeless person says one thing. Not leaving your kid alone with a parish priest in the wake of a clergy sexual abuse crisis says another.In The Cost of Fear, nationally recognized leader in abuse prevention Meg Stone returns the focus to empowerment and shows us safety strategies that really work. Stone argues there are two opposing philosophies of how to make people safer, one of which exacerbates victim-blame (safety through compliance) and the other challenges it (safety through resistance).Deeply researched, The Cost of Fear includes interviews with people who have used their bodies to stop violence, those who teach self-defense as part of political organizing, as well as organizations that are effectively preventing sexual violence by inviting people to speak up for themselves.Stone gives readers practical strategies for keeping themselves and their loved ones safer and shows how personal safety is an essential part of political change, especially for an injustice as intimate as gender-based violence.

"A Haitian-born, Boston-based poet explores the personal and political stories of the Haitians who were part of Congo's 1960s decolonization movement"--

"An acclaimed historian narrates the stories of newly emancipated children who were re-enslaved by white masters through apprenticeships and their parents fights to free them"--

From the son of legendary civil rights organizer Robert P. Moses: a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming Black in America that interweaves voices from 3 generations of the Moses family"Omo Moses has written an epic reaffirmation of Black diasporic life and a clarion call for justice. The White Peril is destined to be read and cherished.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recipient and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoIn The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice.Omo was born in 1972 in Tanzania, where his parents had fled to escape targeted harassment by the US government. He did not encounter white supremacy until the family moved back to America when he was 4. Here, he learned what it meant to be Black. He came of age in a Black enclave of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a passionate basketball player, lived in the shadow of his father’s Civil Rights work but did not feel like a part of it until his college basketball career came to an unceremonious end. Unsure what to do next, he took up his father’s offer to go with him to Mississippi and teach math to Algebra Project students. Omo didn’t know it yet, but it was among those young people that he would find his purpose.This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses’s demand for liberation.

"An urgent examination of the invisibility of Black women and girls as victims of targeted killings, and the lack of police intervention and media coverage"--

A harrowing and indispensable first-hand account of the experience of the first 85 days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, from a prominent Palestinian writer. In the morning I read the news. The news is about us. But it's designed for people reading it far, far away, who couldn't possibly imagine they could ever know anyone involved. It's for people who read the news to comfort themselves, to tell themselves: it's still far, far away. I read the news for different reasons: I read it to know I"m not dead. Early in the morning of Oct 7, 2023, Atef Abu Saif went swimming. It was a beautiful morning: sunny with a cool breeze. The Palestinian Authority's Minister for Culture, he was on a combined work and pleasure trip to Gaza, visiting his extended family with his 15 year old son, Yasser, and participating in National Heritage Day. Then the bombing started. Don't Look Left takes us into the day to day experiences of Gazan civilians trying to survive Israel's war against Hamas, its detail and extended narrative showing us what brief reports and video clips cannot. In a war that has taken an extraordinarily high toll on civilians, it is a crucial document--a day-to-day testimony and a deeply moving depiction of a people's fight to survive and maintain their humanity amid the chaos and trauma of mass destruction. It is also, remarkably, a powerful literary experience. Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza in 1973, and, as he writes, his first war broke out when he was two months old. He writes as only someone who knows Gaza deeply can, and only as someone who knows war can, picking out the details of ordinary life and survival amidst the possibility of death coming at any moment: washing the only shirt he has and waiting naked for three hours for it dry; noticing a cat, as terrified as the people on the street around it, hiding under a bistro table; visiting his sister-in-law's daughter in the hospital, who tells him in her dream she has no legs, and asks him if it is true. It is: she has lost her legs and a hand when her home was hit by a bomb. Trying to figure out the best place to sleep each night, and when and where to flee as the destruction intensifies. This is not like past wars with Israel, Abu Saif soon realizes--thinking of the Nakba, and of images of bombed cities from World War II. Profits from the sale of this book will go to two Palestinian charities: Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Middle East Children's Alliance.

A searing critique of the disability rights movement from within, and a call for collective liberation that is pro-Black and centers disabled people of color For over twenty years, Dara Baldwin has often been the only person of color in the room when significant disability policy decisions are made. Disenfranchisement of people of color and multi-marginalized communities within the disability rights community is not new and has left many inside the community feeling frustrated and erased. In To Be a Problem, Baldwin candidly shares her journey to becoming a disability activist and policymaker in DC while critiquing the disability rights community. She reveals the reality of erasure for many Black people and people of color in the disability movement and argues that, in turn, many white disabled people center themselves within the work without addressing their own white privilege. Disability rights groups have been centering white, straight, cisgender people while racial justice groups often fail to center disabled people, leading many Black and Brown disabled people to start their own Disability Justice organizations. Drawing from her unique vantage point, Baldwin calls readers to understand the shortcomings of the disability rights movement while inspiring us to push all movements towards a more inclusive and authentic liberation.

Offers powerful insight into the portrayal of romantic love by Jean Rhys, Clover Adams, Christina Stead, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and others.

A unique gathering of poems by two great twentieth-century poets, with the original Spanish versions and powerful English translations on facing pages. In a new preface, editor and translator Robert Bly explores what the poems reveal today about politics, the spirit, and the purpose of art.

"The challenge, then, is not to invent new victims or new scapegoats but to mobilize America for the future. What would it take to ensure that all of us can succeed at getting the job done, the problem solved, and the future more secure?" As a student at Yale Law School in 1974, Lani Guinier attended a class with a white male professor who addressed all the students, male and female, as "gentlemen." To him the greeting was a form of honorific, evoking the values of traditional legal education. To her it was profoundly alienating. Years later Guinier began a study of female law students with her colleagues, Michelle Fine and Jane Balin, to try to understand the frustrations of women law students in male-dominated schools. Women are now entering law schools in large numbers, but too often many still do not feel welcome. As one says, "I used to be very driven, competitive. Then I started to realize that all my effort was getting me nowhere. I just stopped caring. I am scarred forever." After interviewing hundreds of women with similar stories, the authors conclude that conventional one-size-fits-all approaches to legal education discourage many women who could otherwise succeed and, even more, fail to help all students realize their full potential as legal problem-solvers. In Becoming Gentlemen Guinier, Fine, and Balin dare us to question what it means to become qualified, what a fair goal in education might be, and what we can learn from the experience of women law students about teaching and evaluating students in general. Including the authors' original study and two essays and a personal afterword by Lani Guinier, the book challenges us to work toward a more just society, based on ideals of cooperation, the resources of diversity, and the values of teamwork.

The story of America's first Muslim institution of higher education, Zaytuna College In the fall of 2010, anti-Muslim furor in the United States reached a breaking point, capping a decade in which such sentiment had surged. Loud, angry crowds gathered near New York's Ground Zero to protest plans to build an Islamic cultural center, while a small-time Florida minister appeared on national television almost nightly promising to celebrate the anniversary of 9/11 with the burning of Korans. At the same time, fifteen devout Muslims quietly gathered in a basement in Berkeley, California, to execute a plan that had been coming together for over a decade: to found Zaytuna College, "Where Islam Meets America." It would be the nation's first four-year Muslim liberal arts college, its mission to establish a thoroughly American, academically rigorous, and traditional indigenous Islam. In Light without Fire, Scott Korb tells the story of the school's founders, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, arguably the two most influential leaders in American Islam, "rock stars" who, tellingly, are little known outside their community. Korb also introduces us to Zaytuna's students, young American Muslims of all stripes who admire--indeed, love--their teachers in ways college students typically don't and whose stories, told for the first time, signal the future of Islam in this country. From a heady theology classroom to a vibrant storefront mosque, from the run-down streets Oakland to grand ballrooms echoing with America's most powerful Muslim voices, Korb follows Zaytuna's students and teachers as they find their place and their voice. He ultimately creates an intimate portrait of the school and provides a new introduction to Islam as it is being lived and re-envisioned in America. It's no exaggeration to say that here, at Zaytuna, are tomorrow's Muslim leaders.

Originally published in 1947, Slave and Citizen is a classic in the field of comparative slave history and race relations.

For readers of Andrea Elliott and Matthew Desmond, the former CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless breaks through the highly destructive misinformation surrounding our homeless neighbors Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute disseminate anti-homeless myths in the media, legislatures, and the larger culture, claiming that our homeless neighbors cause their own predicament and that the best we can do is manage the problem. Drawing on her deep legal knowledge, policy expertise, and decades of frontline service, Mary Brosnahan cuts through the misinformation to deliver two important messages: that homelessness ultimately stems from a lack of investment in affordable housing; and that the greatest myth of all is that we should have no hope. In fact, the proven solutions are well documented, and the ability to enact them depends on us all. Brosnahan takes a nationwide look from New York to Detroit, Philly to L.A., and from rural areas such as Cumberland County, Pennsylvania to debunk 15 widespread misconceptions, including: that the problem is inevitable (in fact, Housing First approaches have shown great success)that "handouts" cause homelessness (in fact, the primary causes are flat wages and high rent)that homeless people need to prove that they're "ready" to receive aid (in fact, enforcing hurdles is far more expensive and less effective than Housing First).With brilliant insight, Brosnahan showcases how by dispelling these pervasive myths rooted in fear, we can embrace the affordable, housing-based solutions that will bring our impoverished neighbors home.