Identity History

This book provides a comprehensive guide to repairing one's credit. The book covers a range of topics, including understanding the impact of credit utilization, dealing with debt and creditors, rebuilding credit, protecting against identity theft and credit fraud, and staying motivated throughout the credit repair process. The book provides practical strategies for reducing credit card debt, establishing new lines of credit, and building a positive payment history. It also covers the rights individuals have under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and the benefits of having good credit. In ...

Identity Crisis takes listeners from the bruising primaries to an election night whose outcome defied the predictions of the pollsters and pundits. The book shows how fundamental characteristics of the nation and its politics - the state of the economy, the Obama presidency, and the demographics of the political parties - combined with the candidates' personalities and rhetoric to produce one of the most unexpected presidencies in history.

One was a tough junkman's son, the other a cosseted mama's boy, but they dreamed the same mighty dream: that the right movies could make a profit and change both the culture and individual lives. Sharing a religion and an evangelical zeal for film, Louis B. Mayer (1884-1957) and Irving Thalberg (1899-1936) were unlikely partners in one of the most significant collaborations in movie history. Over the course of their decade-long relationship, as key players at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and major players in Hollywood, they joined forces in redefining and mastering the template for the film industry.

Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime—a biopic of aviation pioneer Jerrie Cobb, the key figure in a group of extraordinary women who in 1960 passed the same tests as the legendary male astronauts of the Mercury 7 but never went to space. Just as casting was set to begin, Haverstick received a mysterious warning from a government agent; soon she began to suspect that there was more to Jerrie’s story than what met the eye. As she dug deeper, she discovered that Jerrie’s life shadowed that of a mysterious CIA agent named June Cobb.

This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly 19-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the US Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC-Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans. The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?

An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity. When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.

The newest title in the Emergent Strategy Series, Liberated to the Bone, addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence. Bodyworker and cultural worker Susan Raffo addresses intergenerational trauma, social justice, organizing, and how all of these things are relevant to our bodies. The book illuminates three different approaches to healing: ending violence, the significance of being rooted in the present, and creating the conditions to address unfinished histories and generational trauma.

Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.

In The Invisible History of the Human Race, Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be going. While some books explore our genetic inheritance and some popular television shows celebrate ancestry, this is the first book to explore how everything from DNA to emotions to names and the stories that form our lives are all part of our human legacy.

The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.

The Balkan area has historically been one of the world’s most combustible regions. Home to several national groups and at a crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Balkans have exerted an outsized role on world affairs. Infamously, the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, was the final straw that led to World War I. The Balkans, however, had been flammable long before Princip’s bullets murdered the Austrian monarch-in-waiting.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.

We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.

A journalist and author of The Influence of Soros examines the history of Jewish people in America and explores their ever-evolving relationship to the nation’s culture and identity—and each other. What does it mean to be a Bad Jew? Many Jews use the term “Bad Jew” as a weapon against other members of the community or even against themselves. You can be called a Bad Jew if you don’t keep kosher; if you only go to temple on Yom Kippur; if you don’t attend or send your children to Hebrew school; if you enjoy Christmas music; if your partner isn’t Jewish; if you don’t call your mother often enough. The list is endless.

A young teacher navigates the politics of a territory continually “annexed:” Memel/Klaipeda. A raw, short account of what happened to a serious teacher of physical education when the Germans took over Memel and parts of Lithuania in 1939. He struggles with his multicultural identity in face of life-threatening politics, and continually weighs his convictions in choosing citizenship and jobs. The story is a fictionalized memoir written in the third person.

On the banks of the River Mersey is a city with a radical character, shaped by its geography and the achievements of its community - in music, culture and politics. Liverpool is now defined mostly by its appetite for football and the continental successes of its most renowned club. What then does it mean to be a local 'Red' - sculpted by the city's social history - in an age of global expansion? Former players, dedicated fans and civic leaders explain the relationship between the club they support and the city of their birth, exploring the events and moments in time that moulded their ...

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s education system in a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher-ed course materials. Sifting through a wealth of materials, from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program in World War 2. Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution.