What if there was a book that talked about the real challenges we face as 20 Somethings? What if there was a book that offered a new approach to social media? What if there was a book that provided real transparency for Our Generation? Well good news... This is that book.We live in a time where what we are going through, and how we feel is rarely shown? Social media makes us feel like everyone has it better than us. How are we supposed to become successful, confident, and happy in this day and age?Regardless of what our Instagram feeds look like, or how we act on the weekends... it feels like something is missing. "The Struggle Is Real" addresses these questions, realities, and challenges to offer a new perspective for all Young Adults."I wrote this book based on my story, and how I'm feeling right now in my life. You're not alone! In fact, we're all fighting individual battles in this season of life. I'm hoping my transparency will lead to your transformation."Best - Ben

In 1969, Ferdinand Marcos won a second term as president, in one of the dirtiest campaigns in Philippine history. That same year, Edgar Jopson was elected president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines, in a campaign to keep the Communists out of the student movement. Thirteen years later Jopson was gunned down by the military during a raid on an underground safehouse. He was by then one of the most wanted people in the country, with a price on his head, a leading Communist Party cadre and member of the urban underground. Jopson was an unusual individual, and his story is a fascinating one. Yet his experiences were those of a generation of student radicals that came of age in the 1970s, and galvanized a country to action in the 1980s. Thus this book is not just the biography of one person, it is the history of a generation.

Scholars working for communities' rights in California's Central Valley In the Struggle tells the story of the persistent engagement of eight public scholars spanning generations of sustained endeavor, a dogged war in which workers and scholars together repeatedly took on the powerful agricultural industry, the political machines, and even the universities. The stories begin in the 1930s with Paul Taylor, a professor of economics at University of California, Berkeley, who pioneered field research and activism as he travelled through the areas marked by the Great Depression, together with his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange. Working in the heart of California's agricultural Central Valley, Taylor was the first of a succession of scholars who shared the dual commitment to research and engagement, to making problems visible and to effecting change through strategic action. Taylor and Lange intentionally wove their political engagement into their identities and work as researchers, as they conducted studies, led strikes, organized underserved communities, founded community development programs, created nonprofit institutions, and more. This book documents a tradition of politically engaged scholarship in one of the world's most dramatic contexts, full of disparities and contradictions, but also ripe with opportunities to make a difference. It covers a struggle that continues undiminished in the present.

For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation. Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. Race wars within the military and riots across the United States demonstrated the lengths to which white Americans would go to protect a carefully constructed caste system. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination but battered by the harsh realities of segregation, African Americans fought their own “war for democracy,” from the rebellions of black draftees in French and American ports to the mutiny of Army Regulars in Houston, and from the lonely stances of stubborn individuals to organized national campaigns. African Americans abroad and at home reworked notions of nation and belonging, empire and diaspora, manhood and citizenship. By war’s end, they ceased trying to earn equal rights and resolved to demand them. This beautifully written book reclaims World War I as a critical moment in the freedom struggle and places African Americans at the crossroads of social, military, and international history.

Traditional narratives of black educational history suggest that African Americans offered a unified voice concerning Brown v. Board of Education. Jack Dougherty counters this interpretation, demonstrating that black activists engaged in multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting strategies to advance the race by gaining greater control over schools. Dougherty tells the story of black school reform movements in Milwaukee from the 1930s to the 1990s, highlighting the multiple perspectives within each generation. In profiles of four leading activists, he reveals how different generations redefined the meaning of the Brown decision over time to fit the historical conditions of their particular struggles. William Kelley of the Urban League worked to win teaching jobs for blacks and to resettle Southern black migrant children in the 1950s; Lloyd Barbee of the NAACP organized protests in support of integrated schools and the teaching of black history in the 1960s; and Marian McEvilly and Howard Fuller contested--in different ways--the politics of implementing desegregation in the 1970s, paving the way for the 1990s private school voucher movement. Dougherty concludes by contrasting three interpretations of the progress made in the fifty years since Brown, showing how historical perspective can shed light on contemporary debates over race and education reform.

‘For me these Ormond College women were, and are, the first voices of the revolution that is #MeToo in Australia.’ Twenty-five years ago, Australia was in the grip of another debate about sex and power. The Master of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne had been acquitted of indecent assault after complaints by two female students. Helen Garner’s bestselling book about the case, The First Stone, polarised readers over whether the students had been right to take their allegations to the law. Was the feminist movement poisoning gender relations? In Generation F, the young award-winning journalist Virginia Trioli offered a vigorous, incisive and compelling argument for the ongoing need for feminism, while exploring her own bewilderment and anger. She described the real state of sexual harassment, violence, the workplace and the law in Australia: how most women just copped it, but those who felt able to confront it needed all the support they could get. Now – as women around the world speak up about how sexual harassment has destroyed their work, families and lives – Trioli revisits that cultural moment in a new foreword, and in a new afterword considers the situation women face today. Dismayingly, her original text is just as relevant, and her call to action just as powerful.

"Lawrence Reddick (1910-1995) was among the most notable African American intellectuals of his generation. The second curator of the Schomburg Library and a University of Chicago PhD, Reddick helped spearhead Carter Woodson's black history movement in the 1930s, guide the Double Victory campaign during World War II, lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Cold War, mentor Martin Luther King Jr. throughout his entire public life, direct the Opportunities Industrialization Center Institute during the 1960s, and forcefully confront institutional racism within academia during the Black Power era. A lifelong Pan-Africanist, Reddick also fought for decolonization and black self-determination alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Léopold Senghor, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Beyond participating in such struggles, Reddick documented and interpreted them for black and white publics alike"--