In 2015, the beautiful jazz funeral in New Orleans for composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Mayor Mitch Landrieu led the ceremony, attended by living legends of jazz, music aficionados, politicians, and everyday people. The scene captured the history and culture of the city in microcosm--a city legendary for its noisy, complicated, tradition-rich splendor. In City of a Million Dreams, Jason Berry delivers a character-driven history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Chronicling cycles of invention, struggle, death, and rebirth, Berry reveals the city's survival as a triumph of diversity, its map-of-the-world neighborhoods marked by resilience despite hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and floods. Berry orchestrates a parade of vibrant personalities, from the founder Bienville, a warrior emblazoned with snake tattoos; to Governor William C. C. Claiborne, General Andrew Jackson, and Pere Antoine, an influential priest and secret agent of the Inquisition; Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist and visionary artist of the 1960s; and Michael White, the famous clarinetist who remade his life after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. The textured profiles of this extraordinary cast furnish a dramatic narrative of the beloved city, famous the world over for mysterious rituals as people dance when they bury their dead.

17 goals, 195 countries, 1.2 billion youth and a million dreams…that’s all it’s gonna take for the world we are gonna make. A world without poverty, without hunger, with equality, with quality education…Can it happen? Yes, it can. The youth can make it happen. You and I can make it happen. It is just a matter of dreaming of a better tomorrow, a better world TOGETHER. “This book effectively explains the need for collective action and suggests a grassroots action plan to tackle the same. Think globally and act locally is reflected in all SDGs and nicely interpreted by the young author.” Dr. Shruti Shukla Educationist, Environmentalist, career Counselor “Inayat’s personal reflection on how each SDG relates to daily life and each person’s journey is a great example of the type of engagement and commitment that is required for their successful achievement.” Juan Pablo Ramirez Miranda Head of social and human sciences, UNESCO “Dream positive, to think and speak positive, to act positive, for peace! This book will help you.” Johan Galtung Norwegian sociologist, principal founder: peace and conflict studies “The author, a 21-year-old medical student, seeks nothing less than a world with justice and dignity for all. She is dreaming big and wants her contemporaries to join her in creating this world.” David Krieger Founder and President Emeritus, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

What does a dream sound like? In these pages Suanne Camfield writes of the varied dreams that she has pursued over the course of her life. With captivating and eloquent stories and concepts, she guides us through what it feels like to have a stirring deep inside of us and how God guides and shapes us through that sense of calling.

Tells the story of those people responsible for the creation and promotion of the Statue of Liberty, focusing on Auguste Bartholdi who conceived the idea of France's gift to the United States.

Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation. Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today.

The moving story of a New Orleans woman who fought for justice and her community even amidst one of the city's darkest moments. Mark Hertsgaard and Deborah Cotton were strangers to one another, united only by a love of jazz and New Orlean’s distinctive Second Line tradition. And then, during a Mother’s Day parade, they were thrown together when two gunmen fired into the crowd… Deborah Cotton—known to all as Big Red—was among the most grievously injured. She is the driving force of this deeply reported parable of two of America’s most deeply rooted issues. A racial justice activist in her forties who was born to a Black father and a white mother, Cotton was one of twenty people—including the author—shot in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans. Once one of the largest slave ports, the city has long been a vortex of violence and racism. From her apparent deathbed, Big Red shocked observers by urging mercy for two young Black men accused of the attack. “Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger,” she tells Hertsgaard, who, she later said, is “called” to investigate what actually happened, and why. Charismatic, complicated, and struck down in her prime, Big Red and her heroic life will captivate readers. In the wake of the shooting, she never stopped fighting as she sought to get to the core of this uniquely American maelstrom. Big Red's Mercy is an illuminating narrative that provides a human and unflinching look at modern America.

"We've collected useful and memorable stories to produce the kind of sampler we've always wanted to read before setting out. These stories will show you a spectrum of experiences to be had or avoided in Hong Kong"--Back cover