Jackie Mitchell was one of the first female pitchers in professional baseball history. Pitching for the Chattanooga Lookouts Class AA minor leagues baseball team in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession.

Explores teh life and career of the second woman ever to play professional baseball who believed that women had the skills to play on the same teams as men and spent her life fighting for women's rights in sports.

Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.

In 1931, seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell pitches against Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game, becoming the first professional female pitcher in baseball history.

A moving story of racial injustice bravely overcome when a granddaddy takes a test to be allowed to vote and his granddaughter stands tall.

Coretta Scott King Award winner A young girl’s beloved uncle is a talented barber without a shop who never gives up on his dream in this richly illustrated, stirring picture book. Everyone has a favorite relative. For Sarah Jean, it’s her Uncle Jed. Living in the segregated South of the 1920s, where most people are sharecroppers, Uncle Jed is the only black barber in the county and has to travel all over the county to cut his customers’ hair. He lives for the day when he could open his very own barbershop. But there are a lot of setbacks along the way. Will Uncle Jed ever be able to open a shiny new shop?