A moving personal memoir of Mississippi in the 1920s and the bitter harvest of racial repression. As the story opens, six-year-old Buster Briggs boards a Pullman car headed south over the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and we embark with him on what will become his journey from childhood into adolescence. Bus Briggs is a white boy from Indiana who spends his summers and Christmases at his grandparents' Mississippi homeplace—Riverside. Travel with him on this journey of discovery. Join Bus and his cousins as they string popcorn and chinaberries for the yule tree, savor ice cream made from rare Mississippi snow, eat cornbread crumbled in buttermilk, enjoy all-day suckers and dill pickles at the general store. Meet the extended family that lives at Riverside—Buster's grandparents Mammy and Pappy, his aunt Allie and uncle Cally, and his cousins—as well as their black neighbor Mattie Riley and her son Leroy. At the heart of this story lies Buster's strong and sustaining friendship with Leroy. From his Pullman window, Buster first sees Leroy sitting on a stile near Riverside waving at the passing train. Leroy soon becomes Buster's fellow explorer, fishing instructor, and best friend. Before Leroy waves goodbye to Buster's departing train for the last time, an unbreakable bond is formed with the gift of a pocketknife—and what happens because of that gift. Even so, the racial prejudices of the time dictate that the paths of their lives diverge. Wallace Briggs set out to write a memoir of his family and of his own youth, but he has shaped a story that is far more than a personal recollection. Its themes are among the most powerful in literature—love and death, family dynamics, the innocence and selfishness of childhood, the struggle with cultural mores. What Briggs has produced is a work of great power and many pleasures, as finely constructed as a novel or stage play. His prose is crisp, cool, and sweet, like a slice of the watermelon chilling in the artesian well-water at Riverside.

Margrit Schiller was an early member of the Red Army Faction, the West German urban guerrilla group. In 1971 she was captured and charged with a murder she did not commit, and upon her release she returned to the underground, being captured again in early 1974. She would spend most of the 1970s in prison, enduring isolation conditions meant to break the human spirit, and participating hunger strikes and other acts of resistance along with other political prisoners from the RAF. In Remembering the Armed Struggle, Schiller recounts the process through which she joined her generation’s revolt in the 1960s, going from work with drug users to joining the antipsychiatry political organization the Socialist Patients’ Collective and then the RAF. She tells of how she met and worked alongside the group’s founding members, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, Irmgard Möller, and Holger Meins; how she learned the details of the May Offensive and other actions while in her prison cell; about the struggles to defend human dignity in the most degraded of environments, and the relationships she forged with other women in prison. Also included are a foreword by Ann Hansen, who situates the draconian prison conditions inflicted on the RAF within the context of a global counterinsurgency program that would help spawn the plague of mass incarceration we still face today, an afterword by the late Osvaldo Bayer, and an appendix by J. Smith and André Moncourt summarizing the politics and history of the RAF in the 1970s. What People Are Saying “Margrit Schiller’s life story Remembering the Armed Struggle, is not meant to mark a hard break with the Red Army Faction, but is more of a critical reflection in the spirit of solidarity. Even those who do not share Schiller’s perspective well find it interesting to join her as she looks back on her years underground and in prison.” diesseits “Schiller’s recollections are profoundly honest and to the point. She neither glorifies the Red Army Faction nor does she repent or distance herself from her past.” taz “I am moved by the honesty of this story, showing the limits, doubts, and uncertainties. Margrit is far from pretending to be a hero or providing a heroic tale. May Margrit’s experiences and those of her comrades help us to continue the battle for the freedom of political prisoners in any corner of the world. May they also allow us to radically question the prison system, which is used as a space to discard the excluded and to criminalize poverty. . . . Memory, freedom, and desire are part of the experience of resistance of our bodies, of our lives. And Margrit, stripping away her own history in this book, with pain but with courage, helps us to continue spinning colors, flavors, sounds and aromas in this mild time of attempts.” Claudia Korol, author of Las Revoluciones de Berta (2019) from the Prologue to the Spanish edition “The book challenges prejudices and dares to address subjects that are taboo, especially in these latitudes so plagued by silences about the human aspects that mark the reality of the struggle to free ourselves. This story is the story of hundreds of antisystem militants . . . [It] contains that old but not perished left-wing argument from the 1960s about how words should have some connection to actions . . .” Grupo de ex presas politicas: Memoria v testimonios

In Their Time revolves around the life and times of Harriet Arnold, mistress of Daffodil Hill. Tall, attractive, headstrong, auburn haired Harriet finds herself struggling to survive during the Union army's occupation of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. With her husband Edwin, away fighting under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Harriet struggles to raise two teenage daughters and to protect her palatial home and property from Yankee soldiers who several time threaten to set her home ablaze. And if dealing with the Union soldiers were not enough, she also is forced to deal with Daffodil Hill's former revengeful overseer and a sex-crazed gambler bent on kidnapping her daughters and beautiful young house guests. Although this carefully researched, historically accurate novel brings a people, a place and a time alive again it goes beyond a portrayal of a particular people in a specific place while exploring the broader war, especially those battles that directly impacted Middle Tennessee. Although sorely tested, Harriet's early frontier training has prepared her well for the challenges she must face during the dark and difficult war years. Faced with events so shocking that she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams, Harriet somehow manages to courageously defend her household with grit and a fierce and indomitable spirit.

The authors provide the first systematic study of the infamous massacre now regarded as one of the most extreme cases of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history.

This engrossing collection of prison memoirs by Russian women is the first to portray the direct experiences of the wide range of women who were incarcerated in Soviet prisons and camps. Comprising the stories of women from all classes and backgrounds, this book covers the entire span of the Gulag's existence from the 1920s to the 1980s, including the little-known periods of political repression of the 1960s and 1980s. These memoirs and letters provide a rich portrait of how women led everyday life in prison and in the camps, of the strategies of accommodation and resistance they employed, and the challenges they faced when they reentered Soviet society. Although readers will hear the voices of women who were in excruciating physical and emotional pain, they will also find remarkable testimonies to the agency and resilience of women who struggled against incredible odds. Written by women from all stations in life and from drastically different backgrounds, these stories reconstruct not only the world of the Gulag but also its meaning for society at large. The documents excerpted here point to areas of Soviet history and culture that have yet to be fully investigated as they illuminate women's experiences of friendship, work, hope, inspiration, loss, and terror. All the works selected for the collection are united by their authors' sense of group and individual identity. To varying degrees, all of them associate their experiences with events and people beyond their personal experiences and immediate surroundings, thus expanding the traditional perspective of women's writing. These riveting stories, never before published in English or Russian, will appeal to scholars and students of Soviet history and literature, as well as general readers interested in women's history.

On January 1, 1943, my dad, James K. (Kenneth) Allardice, began keeping a diary in what were called "national diary." These were fairly large diaries (91⁄2" × 71⁄2"), and he faithfully kept a daily accounting of family activities as well as noting important local, national, and international events. In many respects, these diaries resemble newspaper pages. This was due to his early endeavors as a newspaper founder, columnist, editor, and publisher. What you will read in the following pages are just excerpts from the diaries. It was quite a task to choose what to include as the diaries from 1943 to 1963 contain almost 7,300 pages as well as hundreds of clippings and photos. I hope that what follows will give an interesting account of my family growing up together, dealing with the everyday joys and challenges, and what life was like at 611 Main Street, Toms River, New Jersey. The diaries are archived with the Ocean County Historical Society in Toms River, New Jersey. James G. B. Allardice