"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Can you ever break free from the patterns of life? Are you really stuck with no choices? What would happen if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness? Would you find a way to change your life, even if you didn’t know how much time you had left? After thirty years of running their own businesses, Bianca and Bill realize they need a change. Bill’s blood pressure is dangerously high, and they have both gained more weight than they care to admit. Freedom Walk is a personal account of how lives can be transformed with intention and commitment. Come share the adventure as they walk across England at 50+ years old. Once in England, they savour the sights, sounds, and smells of the landscape and the villages along the wall path: Bowness on Solway, Carlisle, Twice Brewed, and Wallsend. They recount tales of other wall walkers, innkeepers, and the culinary delights they experience along the way—from the full Cumbrian breakfast to a variety of flavour-filled dinners. With wild flowers, the call of pheasants, and the wall wending in the distance to accompany them, Bill and Bianca awaken to the beauty and magic of being in the present moment. But the walk also brings unexpected challenges, both physical and emotional. Their commitment to each other and to the walk itself helps them complete the journey—closer as a couple than ever. "A delightful account of a life-altering trip, written in a lovely, personal style that makes the reader feel like a close friend." —Diane Keating, Instructor in English, University of Winnipeg

The extraordinary life of Priscilla Joyner and her quest—along with other formerly enslaved people—to define freedom after the Civil War. Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage. Her life story—candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project—captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation—the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities: what to wear and where to live, what jobs to take and who to love. Although Joyner was educated at a Freedmen’s Bureau school and married a man she loved, slavery cast a long shadow. Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could. Weaving together illuminating voices from the charter generation, To Walk About in Freedom gives us a kaleidoscopic look at the lived experiences of emancipation and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery.

Can you ever break free from the patterns of life? Are you really stuck with no choices? What would happen if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness? Would you find a way to change your life, even if you didn’t know how much time you had left? After thirty years of running their own businesses, Bianca and Bill realize they need a change. Bill’s blood pressure is dangerously high, and they have both gained more weight than they care to admit. Freedom Walk is a personal account of how lives can be transformed with intention and commitment. Come share the adventure as they walk across England at 50+ years old. Once in England, they savour the sights, sounds, and smells of the landscape and the villages along the wall path: Bowness on Solway, Carlisle, Twice Brewed, and Wallsend. They recount tales of other wall walkers, innkeepers, and the culinary delights they experience along the way—from the full Cumbrian breakfast to a variety of flavour-filled dinners. With wild flowers, the call of pheasants, and the wall wending in the distance to accompany them, Bill and Bianca awaken to the beauty and magic of being in the present moment. But the walk also brings unexpected challenges, both physical and emotional. Their commitment to each other and to the walk itself helps them complete the journey—closer as a couple than ever. "A delightful account of a life-altering trip, written in a lovely, personal style that makes the reader feel like a close friend." —Diane Keating, Instructor in English, University of Winnipeg

In 1963, the streams of religious revival, racial strife, and cold-war politics were feeding the swelling river of social unrest in America. Marshaling massive forces, civil rights leaders were primed for a widescale attack on injustice in the South. By summer the conflict rose to great intensity as blacks and whites clashed in Birmingham. Outside the massive drive, Bill Moore, a white mail carrier, had made his own assault a few months earlier. Jeered and assailed as he made a solitary civil rights march along the Deep South highways, he was ridiculed by racists as a "crazy man." His well publicized purpose: to walk from Chattanooga to Jackson and hand-deliver a plea for racial tolerance to Ross Barnett, the staunchly segregationist governor of Mississippi. On April 23, on a highway near Attalla, Alabama, this lone crusader was shot dead. Although he was not a nobly ideal figure handpicked by shapers of the movement, inadvertently he became one of its earliest martyrs and, until now, part of an overlooked chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. Floyd Simpson, a grocer and a member of the Gadsden, Alabama chapter of the Ku Klux Koan, was charged with Moore's murder. A week later, a white college student named Sam Shirah led five black and five white volunteers into Alabama to finish Moore's walk. They were beaten and jailed. Four other attempts to complete the postman's quest were similarly stymied. Moore had kept a journal that detailed his goal. Using it, along with interviews and extensive newspaper and newsreel reports, Mary Stanton has documented this phenomenal freedom walk as seen through the eyes of Moore, Shirah, and the gunman, the three protagonists. Though all shared a deep love of the South, their strong feelings about who was entitled to walk its highways were in deadly conflict.

Harriet Tubman, freedom fighter and leader in the Underground Railroad, is one of the most significant figures in U.S. history. Her courage and determination in bringing enslaved people to freedom have established her as an icon of the abolitionist movement. But behind the history of the heroine called "Moses" was a woman of deep faith. In Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman, Therese Taylor-Stinson introduces Harriet, a woman born into slavery whose unwavering faith and practices in spirituality and contemplation carried her through insufferable abuse and hardship to become a leader for her people. Her profound internal liberation came from deep roots in mysticism, Christianity, nature spirituality, and African Indigenous beliefs that empowered her own escape from enslavement--giving her the strength and purpose to lead others on the road to freedom. Harriet's lived spirituality illuminates a profound path forward for those of us longing for internal freedom, as well as justice and equity in our communities. As people of color, we must cultivate our full selves for our own liberation and the liberation of our communities. As the luminous significance of Harriet Tubman's spiritual life is revealed, so too is the path to our own spiritual truth, advocacy, and racial justice as we follow in her footsteps.