** Chosen by Oprah Daily as one of the Best Books to Pick Up in May 2021 ** 'Fast-paced but nuanced ... impeccably researched ... a much-needed book' The Guardian ''[S]o dystopian and apocalyptic that you can hardly believe what you are reading. ... But the story [it] tells is an essential one, with just a glimmer of hope in it. Because of the work of Ellsworth and many others, America is finally staring this appalling chapter of its history in the face. It's not a pretty sight.' Sunday Times A gripping exploration of the worst single incident of racial violence in American history, timed to coincide with its 100th anniversary. On 31 May 1921, in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mob of white men and women reduced a prosperous African American community, known as Black Wall Street, to rubble, leaving countless dead and unaccounted for, and thousands of homes and businesses destroyed. But along with the bodies, they buried the secrets of the crime. Scott Ellsworth, a native of Tulsa, became determined to unearth the secrets of his home town. Now, nearly 40 years after his first major historical account of the massacre, Ellsworth returns to the city in search of answers. Along with a prominent African American forensic archaeologist whose family survived the riots, Ellsworth has been tasked with locating and exhuming the mass graves and identifying the victims for the first time. But the investigation is not simply to find graves or bodies - it is a reckoning with one of the darkest chapters of American history. '[A] riveting, painful-to-read account of a mass crime that, to our everlasting shame ... has avoided justice. Ellsworth's book presents us with a clear history of the Tulsa massacre and with that rendering, a chance for atonement ... Readers of this book will fervently hope we take that opportunity.' Washington Post

As a pandemic and racial reckoning exposed society's faults, Christian thinkers were laying the groundwork for a better future. A public health and economic crisis provoked by Covid-19. A social crisis cracked open by the filmed murder of George Floyd. A leadership crisis laid bare as the gravity of a global pandemic met a country suffocating in political polarization and idolatry. In the spring of 2020 Comment and Plough magazines created a joint publishing project that would tap the resources of the Christian humanist tradition to respond collaboratively and imaginatively to these crises. This volume, written in real time during a year that revealed the depths of our society's fissures, provides a wealth of proposals and reflections on what should come after: how we can truly renew our civilization. Breaking Ground has grown into a network of institutions and people that will continue to respond to these ongoing challenges with a deeply Christian and human vision for the future. Contributors include Anthony Barr, Marilynne Robinson, N. T. Wright, Adam Carrington, Gregory Thompson, Shadi Hamid, Rachel Anderson, John Clair, Christine Emba, Jennifer Frey, Michael Wear, David Grubbs, John Milbank, Mark Noll, Michael Lamb, Joe Nail, Charles Camosy, Dante Stewart, Katherine Boyle, Duke Kwon, Gracy Olmstead, Phil Christman, Brad Littlejohn, Brandon Mcginley, Oliver O Donovan, Amy Julia Becker, Chris Lambert, Benya Kraus, Carlo Lancellotti, Luke Bretherton, Jake Meador, Jeffrey Bilbro, Mark Gerzon, Cherie Harder, Susannah Black, Joe Boland, Patrick Pierson, Samuel Kimbriel, Kurt Armstrong, Patrick Tomassi, Chris Lambert, Stuart Mcalpine, Elayne Allen, Mack Mccarter, Father Jack Wall, Myles Werntz, Tobias Cremer, Doug Sikkema, E. J. Hutchinson, J. L. Wall, Joel Halldorf, Aryana Petrosky Roberts, Chelsea Langston Bambino, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Dwan Dandridge, Erin And David Leaverton, Heather C. O'Haneson, Irena Dragas Jansen, James Matthew Wilson, Joseph M Keegin, Joshua Bambino, and L. M. Sacasas.

In September 1991, archaeologists began to turn up graves and bodies in lower Manhattan. Well-known maps had shown that this was the site of New York's first burial ground for slaves and free blacks. "Breaking Ground, Breaking Silence" uses the rediscovery of the burial grounds as a window on a fascinating side of colonial history and as an introduction to the careful science that is uncovering all of the secrets of the past.

While Louis W. Sullivan was a student at Morehouse College, Morehouse president Benjamin Mays said something to the student body that stuck with him for the rest of his life. "The tragedy of life is not failing to reach our goals," Mays said. "It is not having goals to reach." In Breaking Ground, Sullivan recounts his extraordinary life beginning with his childhood in Jim Crow south Georgia and continuing through his trailblazing endeavors training to become a physician in an almost entirely white environment in the Northeast, founding and then leading the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and serving as secretary of Health and Human Services in President George H. W. Bush's administration. Throughout this extraordinary life Sullivan has passionately championed both improved health care and increased access to medical professions for the poor and people of color. At five years old, Louis Sullivan declared to his mother that he wanted to be a doctor. Given the harsh segregation in Blakely, Georgia, and its lack of adequate schools for African Americans at the time, his parents sent Louis and his brother, Walter, to Savannah and later Atlanta, where greater educational opportunities existed for blacks. After attending Booker T. Washington High School and Morehouse College, Sullivan went to medical school at Boston University--he was the sole African American student in his class. He eventually became the chief of hematology there until Hugh Gloster, the president of Morehouse College, presented him with an opportunity he couldn't refuse: Would Sullivan be the founding dean of Morehouse's new medical school? He agreed and went on to create a state-of-the-art institution dedicated to helping poor and minority students become doctors. During this period he established long-lasting relationships with George H. W. and Barbara Bush that would eventually result in his becoming the secretary of Health and Human Services in 1989. Sullivan details his experiences in Washington dealing with the burgeoning AIDS crisis, PETA activists, and antismoking efforts, along with his efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act. Along the way his interactions with a cast of politicos, including Thurgood Marshall, Jack Kemp, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Helms, and the Bushes, capture vividly a particular moment in recent history. Sullivan's life--from Morehouse to the White House and his ongoing work with medical students in South Africa--is the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the civil rights movement fought to achieve. His story should inspire future generations--of all backgrounds--to aspire to great things. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

In 2003, a backhoe operator hired by the state of Washington to work on the Port Angeles waterfront discovered what a larger world would soon learn. The place chosen to dig a massive dry dock was atop one of the largest and oldest Indian village sites ever found in the region. Yet the state continued its project, disturbing hundreds of burials and unearthing more than 10,000 artifacts at Tse-whit-zen village, the heart of the long-buried homeland of the Klallam people. Excitement at the archaeological find of a generation gave way to anguish as tribal members working alongside state construction workers encountered more and more human remains, including many intact burials. Finally, tribal members said the words that stopped the project: "Enough is enough." Soon after, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe chairwoman Frances Charles asked the state to walk away from more than $70 million in public money already spent on the project and find a new site. The state, in an unprecedented and controversial decision that reverberated around the nation, agreed. In search of the story behind the story, Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes spent more than a year interviewing tribal members, archaeologists, historians, city and state officials, and local residents and business leaders. Her account begins with the history of Tse-whit-zen village, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century impacts of contact, forced assimilation, and industrialization. She then engages all the voices involved in the dry dock controversy to explore how the site was chosen, and how the decisions were made first to proceed and then to abandon the project, as well as the aftermath and implications of those controversial choices. This beautifully crafted and compassionate account, illustrated with nearly 100 photographs, illuminates the collective amnesia that led to the choice of the Port Angeles construction site. "You have to know your past in order to build your future," Charles says, recounting the words of tribal elders. Breaking Ground takes that teaching to heart, demonstrating that the lessons of Tse-whit-zen are teachings from which we all may benefit. A Capell Family Book

A memoir of a quest to eradicate landmines from the face of the Earth—and replace dangerous ground with productive farmland: “Kuhn is an inspiration.” —Gillian Sorensen, former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General After surviving a bout with cancer, Heidi Kühn decided to devote herself to ridding the world of another kind of life-threatening scourge: landmines in regions as far-flung as Croatia, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Inspired by the work of the late Princess Diana, Heidi began the humanitarian organization Roots of Peace from the basement of her Northern California home. She gained the support of famed Napa Valley vintners Robert Mondavi and Mike Grgich, and soon her “mines-to-vines” mission began to take hold. In this powerful memoir, Heidi tells the Roots of Peace story, from the early days in which she built her vision to her current presence on the global stage, where she has worked with presidents, prime ministers, landmine survivors, and religious leaders from around the world to spread a message of peace and recovery. In the years since the founding of Roots of Peace, its agricultural projects have made tremendous progress to fight against landmines, revitalizing devastated land and uplifting the lives of countless people in the process. This is a story of healing, faith, and how an ordinary person can inspire remarkable change—and plant the seeds of a brighter future.

Not since Martha Schinz's masterful Visions of Paradise, published in 1984, has there been such an important survey of garden design and style as Breaking Ground. Whereas Visions of Paradise featured classic European garden design, Breaking Ground takes an in-depth look at the work of ten contemporary garden designers living and working in America and Europe today. The two hundred glorious full-color photographs by Erica Lennard and the lucid text by garden writer and designer Page Dickey capture the spirit and genius of the ten designers. A chapter is devoted to each designer--his or her sources of inspiration, style, philosophy, and method of creation. From the bold Southern California designs of Nancy Power to the urban geometries of Madison Cox to the updated French formal style of Louis Benech to the romantic country gardens of Nancy McCabe, Breaking Ground profiles the artists who are redefining garden design categories. Inspirational, informative, contemporary, and beautiful, Breaking Ground is a spectacularly crafted object in itself--sure to be one of the major garden gift books of the season.