is a collection of three life stories by three Korean high school students in New York and New Jersey. Hojae Jin is a senior at Tenafly High School in New Jersey. Kevin Kang is a senior at a high school in Rockland County, New York. David Yun is a senior at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. This book is crucial for understanding the experiences of Korean-American youth. By reading this book, readers will share in joys and sorrows of the Korean immigration experience.

Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. * The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art * Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study * Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture * Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each * Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful

Concerned scholars and educators, since the early 20th century, have asked questions regarding the viability of Black history in k-12 schools. Over the years, we have seen k12 Black history expand as an academic subject, which has altered research questions that deviate from whether Black history is important to know to what type of Black history knowledge and pedagogies should be cultivated in classrooms in order to present a more holistic understanding of the group' s historical significance. Research around this subject has been stagnated, typically focusing on the subject's tokenism and problematic status within education. We know little of the state of k-12 Black history education and the different perspectives that Black history encompasses. The book, Perspectives on Black Histories in Schools, brings together a diverse group of scholars who discuss how k-12 Black history is understood in education. The book's chapters focus on the question, what is Black history, and explores that inquiry through various mediums including its foundation, curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and psychology. The book provides researchers, teacher educators, and historians an examination into how much k12 Black history has come and yet how long it still needed to go.

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"Draws upon previously neglected primary sources to offer a ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics at work in the institutional merging of three American Methodist denominations in 1939. Davis boldly examines the conflicted ethics behind a dominant American religious culture's justification and preservation of racial segregation in the reformulation of its post-slavery institutional presence in American society. His work provides a much-needed, critical discussion of the racial issues that pervaded American religion and culture in the early twentieth century.a
--Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Academic Dean and Associate Professor of History and Theology, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio

aA discerning, sober, and troubling probing of the preoccupation within the Methodist Church with Christian nationalism, civilization as defined by white Anglo-Saxon manhood, and race, race consciousness and athe problem of the Negroa that was foundational to and constitutive of a reunited Methodism. A must read for students of early 20th century America.a
--Russell E. Richey, Emory University

In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists.

The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church, and how their plan for unification came to institutionalizeracism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as auniteda when members in the church body were racially divided?

Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Morris L. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century -- including high-profile African American clergy -- were very much against racial equality, believing that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society.

The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.

When asked to name the first ""militant"" Black characters in film, we might imagine Blaxploitation heroes like Sweetback or Shaft. Yet, as this groundbreaking new book shows, there was a much earlier cycle of films featuring militant Black men - many of which were sponsored by the U.S. government. Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw Black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. Elizabeth Reich traces the figure across a wide variety of movie genres, from action blockbusters like Bataan to patriotic musicals like Stormy Weather. In the process, she reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and Black filmmakers. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic Black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, Black internationalism, and American militarism. She reads the Black soldier in film as inherently transnational, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of Black artistry and performance. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, it also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.

First published in 1853, 12 Years a Slave is the riveting true story of a free black American who was sold into slavery, remaining there for a dozen years until he finally escaped. This powerfully written memoir details the horrors of slave markets, the inhumanity practiced on southern plantations, and the nobility of a man who persevered in some of the worst of conditions, a man who never ceased to hope that he would find freedom and see his beloved family again. This edition has been slightly edited--for spelling and punctuation only--for easier reading by a modern audience. It also includes two helpful appendixes not found in the original book. Now a major motion picture

This book is an essential addition to the study of comparative black literature of the Americas; it will also fill the gap that exists on theoretical studies exploring black women's writing from the Spanish Caribbean. This book examines literary representations of the historic roots of black women's resistance in the United States and Cuba by studying the following texts by both African American and Afro-Cuban women from four different literary genres (autobiographical slave narrative, contemporary novel on slavery, testimonial narrative, and poetry): Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by the African American former slave Harriet Jacobs, Dessa Rose (1986) by the African American writer Sherley Ann Williams, Reyita, sencillamente: testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenarian Simply Reyita. Testimonial Narrative of a Nonagenarian Black Cuban Woman] (1996), written/transcribed by the Afro-Cuban historian Daisy Rubiera Castillo from her interviews with her mother Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, "Reyita," and a selection of poems from the contemporary Afro-Cuban poets Nancy Morejon and Georgina Herrera. The study argues that the writers participate in black women's self-inscription in the historical process by positioning themselves as subjects of their history and seizing discursive control of their (hi)stories. Although the texts form part of separate discourses, the book explores the commonalities of the rhetorical devices and narrative strategies employed by the authors as they disassemble racist and sexist stereotypes, (re)constructing black female subjectivity through an image of active resistance against oppression, one that authorizes unconventional definitions of womanhood and motherhood. The book shows that in the womens' revisions of national history, their writings also demonstrate the pervasive role of racial and gender categories in the creation of a discourse of national identity, while promoting a historiography constructed within flexible borders that need to be negotiated constantly. The study's engagement in crosscultural exploration constitutes a step further in opening connections with a comparative literary study that is theoretically engaging, in order to include Afro-Cuban women writers and Afro-Caribbean scholars into scholarly discussions in which African American women have already managed to participate with a series of critical texts. The book explores connections between methods and perspectives derived from Western theories and from Caribbean and Black studies, while recognizing the black women authors studied as critics and scholars. In this sense, the book includes some of the writers' own commentaries about their work, taken from interviews (many of them conducted by the author Paula Sanmartin herself), as well as critical essays and letters. Black Women as Custodians of History adds a new dimension to the body of existing criticism by challenging the ways assumptions have shaped how literature is read by black women writers. Paula Sanmartin's study is a vivid demonstration of the strengths of embarking on multidisciplinary study. This book will be useful to several disciplines and areas of study, such as African diaspora studies, African American studies, (Afro) Latin American and (Afro) Caribbean studies, women's studies, genre studies, and slavery studies.

Becoming a Model Minority: Schooling Experiences of Ethnic Koreans in China looks at the manner in which ethnic Korean students construct self-perception out of the model minority stereotype in their school and lives in Northeast China. It also examines how this self-perception impacts the strength of the model minority stereotype in their attitudes toward school and strategies for success. Fang Gao shows how this stereotype tends to obscure significant barriers to scholastic success suffered by Korean students, as well as how it silences the disadvantages faced by Korean schooling in China's reform period and neglects the importance of multiculturalism and racial equality under the context of a harmonious society.

No Prejudice Here chronicles a heretofore untold story of civil rights in modern America. In embracing the Western urban experience, it relates the struggle for civil rights and school desegregation in Denver, Colorado. It chronicles early legislative and political trends to promote Denver as a racially tolerant city, which encouraged African-Americans to move to the urban center for opportunities unique to communities in the postwar American West while nonetheless trying to maintain segregation by limiting educational and employment opportunities for minorities. Dynamic historian Summer Cherland recounts this tension over six decades, with specific attention to the role of community control efforts, legislative and political strategies, and the importance of youth activism. Her insightful study provides an overview of the seminar 1974 Supreme Court case Keyes v. Denver Public Schools No. 1, and traces the community's reaction to court decisions until the city was released from federal oversight twenty years later. Cherland's book proves that civil rights activism, and the need for it, lasted well beyond the years that typically define the civil rights movement, and illustrates for our contemporary consideration the longstanding struggle in urban communities for justice and equality.

Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotia-tion used by free blacks in the aftermath of the "Year of the Lash"--a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades.

At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Placido (Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects.

Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into under-standing how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.

"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." - Mark Twain Within your hands is a glimpse into the life, mind, soul, and "truth" of cherished American icon, Mark Twain. This uncensored autobiography is not only a legacy he left behind, but also a gift to all.
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He grew up on the shores of the Mississippi River and took his pen name from the way Mississippi steamboat crews measured the river's depth (the cry "Mark twain " meant the river was at least 12 feet deep and safe to travel).
Twain wrote prolifically, publishing novels, travelogues, newspaper articles, short stories, and political pamphlets. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
On the surface, these novels are gripping adventure stories of boys running free on the Mississippi. However, on a deeper level, these novels are also serious works of social criticism. Written while America was still recovering from the Civil War and adjusting to the abolition of slavery, Twain's two best-known Mississippi River adventure tales also measure the depth of America's new economic and social realities.
His most personal and insightful writing came when he created his, "Final (and Right) Plan"-a free-flowing biography of the thoughts and interests he had toward the end of his life as he spoke his "whole frank mind." Along with the plan, came the instruction that the enclosed autobiography writings not be published in book form until 100 years after his death.
Today, we honor the life and writings of Mark Twain by publishing his personal opus-to reacquaint ourselves with the wit, wisdom, and ideals of this legendary American icon.

The Proper Criticism of Some Decent People A Candid, Unblinking, Unapologetic, Uncompromising Look at the Leadership Crisis in Black America and the Impact on the Leadership of America By Dr. Theophilus Green _____________________________________________ "None of us are born with prejudice. It is not a human response or reaction that comes naturally. Yet, it is a practice that has persisted for nearly five hundred years in what is now the United States of America." With those words, Chicago psychologist Dr. Theophilus Green begins an unflinching analysis of virtually every major luminary to influence American civil rights in the last fifty years. With uncommon results: On O.J. Simpson: L.A. police on the scene may have been confused about the identity of the murderer because blood is red and O.J. is black. But not the psychologists. The reason? They each asked themselves the same question. Who would know Nicole had breast implants, and who would take time to destroy them, -but the guy who paid for them? On Black women: The fully Americanized black woman is a willful, dominating, colorful, controlling, unique mixture of female. You should read that as a compliment, not an editorial. You should also consider it fair warning. On Former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun: Ultimately, finally and unfortunately, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun was always alone. Top the heap, queen of the roost, best seat in the best game in town. She was also the poster woman for every black woman in America. No man, no strong family, no strong support group, surrounded by manipulators, schemers and cons. It's a wonder she survived it at all. On Rev. Jesse Jackson: It is embarrassing to later discover that Rev. Jackson's real motive for going to Washington to counsel the President may have been the opportunity to go skipping down the hotel halls to play with his own girlfriend, who was unlike Lewinsky, pregnant. On Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley: Say what you want about the Mayor of Chicago, his abuse of privilege, the under the table contracts, the investigations that never seem to result in indictments. He can't pronounce the language and only plays fair for a fare. But you have to give the man his due. He takes second to no one in raising a man. Stand up and give the family just applause. His son Patrick Daley is a man for all the right reasons. ("Well done, young man, well done.") Well done, indeed. "Thank you for the monograph. Interesting and Provocative" Colin Powell U.S. Secretary of State "The most important book for every black child in the 21st century." Elmira Mayes, Founder, Director, Loop Lab School "I never thought I would ever read a book that would admit that the Catholic church celibacy hypocrisy breeds pedophiles." Robert Knight, Chairman, Committee to Seek Redress Justice for Children of Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse