Dorothy Sterling

Based largely on eyewitness accounts, this reconstruction of the best known and least understood major event in our history'' depicts the American Revolution not as a rational movement based on Locke's ideas--but as a conflict buffeted by the passions of unruly men. The title refers not only to the song played by the British at their Yorktown surrender but also to the upheaval caused by the eight-year conflict. Although his descriptions of the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party push his narrative off to a rousing, iconoclastic start, Tebbel (coauthor, The Magazine in America, 1991, etc.) doesn't expand the pre-Revolutionary era beyond the Massachusetts theater and can't quite maintain the breathless pace of these set pieces. In his eagerness to save the American Revolution from mummification, he uses present tense and colloquial narration, sometimes to arch effect (And where is our boy Lafayette?''). He also exaggerates our contemporary glorification of the war (every schoolkid still knows that these were the times that try men's souls''). But Tebbel does detail to often stunning effect the problems that plagued the patriots: starving and badly paid soldiers; a citizenry as apathetic as it was opportunistic; a dithering and impotent Continental Congress; recruiting scandals; profiteering contractors; and vicious attacks and reprisals by rebels and loyalists. Although the author admires George Washington for his dogged perseverance and Daniel Morgan for his buckskin charisma, he takes pleasure in the portrait dipped in acid-- including ones of Samuel Adams, the Boston firebrand never squeamish about bending truth in the service of propaganda; John Paul Jones, the tyrannical sea-dog-turned-legend by refusing to give up the battle; and General Charles Lee, Washington's one-time second-in-command, a misanthrope who loved dogs more than people- -and who, while in prison, plotted to betray the rebels. Not quite the bottom-rail view of history to which it aspires, nor as revisionist as it hopes--but often vividly impressionistic. (Four maps)

1. Ellen Craft: the valiant journey -- 2. Ida B. Wells: voice of a people -- 3. Mary Church Terrell: ninty years for freedom.

This collection, drawn from a wealth of original research into previously untapped sources - including letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, poems, songs, newspaper articles, advertisements, a ship's log, and official documents - allows African Americans to speak afresh across more than two centuries. Besides the expected voices of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, this book makes vivid the experiences and views of a diverse range of lesser-known but equally fascinating personalities: Ira Aldridge, one of the great Shakespearean actors of his day; William Allen, the first black college professor in the country; the astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker; Paul Cuffe, owner of a fleet of merchant ships; Martin R. Delany, the father of black nationalism; James Forten, war veteran, inventor, and one of the wealthiest men in America; the militant Henry Highland Garnet, who urged slaves to revolt; the poet Phillis Wheatley; as well as ordinary free blacks, fugitive slaves, soldiers, wives, mothers, pioneers, sailors, and numerous others.

Traces the history of the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, emphasizing its influence in rousing public opinion throughout the country in support of the civil rights issue.

Biography of the nineteenth-century New England woman who was the Quaker daughter of a Nantucket sea captain and who fought for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights.

M.J. finally gets over Spider-Man and is excited about going to homecoming with her boyfriend Harry. However, Harry's father blames M.J. for his son's slipping grades and M.J.'s best friend Liz thinks that M.J. is after her boyfriend Flash.

Robert Smalls, born a slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, grew up to become the best pilot in Charleston until Fort Sumter fell. Then he decided to take the paddle-wheel steamer, the "Planter," over to the Northern forces and free himself and his family. Thereafter he became a man who fought for freedom in the United States Army, and later went to Congress and worked through the hopes and disillusionment of Reconstruction. (Publisher).