NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Stories reflect culture, and American stories reflect American culture is Livia Polanyi's provocative thesis in Telling the American Story. Combining linguistic and cultural analyses, Polanyi provides thoughtful insights into many features of conversational stories that have either been put aside or omitted from formal analysis within cognitive science. She also brings to life stories as cultural artifacts in which every evaluation, presupposition, point, perspective, and interpretation is a reflection of popular culture.Examining the structure of autobiographical stories, Polanyi pays close attention to the storyteller's own evaluation of the events he or she is narrating -- why it is being told, and what the audience is to learn by it. This leads to an extended discussion of the ways in which narrative structure is embedded in conversation. Polanyi shows how in negotiating a story and negotiating the point of a story, false starts and repairs can be used to further the narrative.Polanyi then analyzes several personal American stories such as "Fainting on the Subway" and "Eating on the New York Thruway" -- for the propositions they express about American culture and draws these propositions together in a broad compendium, or grammar, of cultural assumptions. These chapters in particular provide perhaps the earliest and best efforts at making explicit the commonsense knowledge that underlies discourse and every other human activity.The book concludes with the creation of "The American story," a text made up of sentences each of which can be seen as a compressed form of a myriad of "real" stories told in American conversation. Livia Polanyi is with Bolt, Beranek and Newman. A Bradford Book.

The vital resource that provides all assignments for the America’s Story Volume 1 course, which includes: Materials list for each chapter, oral narration questions and answers, directed journaling, artwork sketching and study sections, Map Adventures, optional Digging Deeper sections, and more.Book of Prayers, review sections, special project ideas, and answer keys. OVERVIEW: America’s Story Vol. 1 is written with narration as a key element of this course. Please take the time to employ oral narration whenever suggested. Included in each chapter of this Teacher Guide is a written narration prompt for the older child. Students will learn about the ancient Americas to the great Gold Rush, the infancy of our country through the founding of our great nation, catching glimpses of the leaders who would become known as the Founding Fathers. The course includes 28 chapters and five built-in reviews, making it easy to finish in one school year. The activity pages are an assortment of map adventures, areas to write/journal, Scriptures and famous sayings for copy work, hands-on projects, and pictures to draw and color. There is also a timeline project, including the simple instructions for completion. FEATURES: The calendar provides 5 daily lessons with clear objectives and activities.

Telling America's Story to the World--Problems and Issues