Sold against his will into indentured servitude, young Jed Crane is happy that his newest master, Mr. Box, will permit him to learn to read, but Jed becomes alarmed when he learns about Box's affiliation with the American patriots.

Recipient of a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Award A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of 2019 A young slave girl witnesses the heartbreak and hopefulness of her family and their plantation community when her brother escapes for freedom in this brilliantly conceived picture book by Coretta Scott King Award winner James E. Ransome. Every single morning, the overseer of the plantation rings the bell. Daddy gathers wood. Mama cooks. Ben and the other slaves go out to work. Each day is the same. Full of grueling work and sweltering heat. Every day, except one, when the bell rings and Ben is nowhere to be found. Because Ben ran. Yet, despite their fear and sadness, his family remains hopeful that maybe, just maybe, he made it North. That he is free. An ode to hope and a powerful tribute to the courage of those who ran for freedom, The Bell Rang is a stunning reminder that our past can never be forgotten.

Hard to Get is a powerful and intimate examination of the sex and love lives of the most liberated women in history—twenty-something American women who have had more opportunities, more positive role models, and more information than any previous generation. Drawing from her years of experience as a researcher and a psychotherapist, Leslie C. Bell takes us directly into the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure, and to make sense of their historically unique but contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges. In candid interviews, Bell’s subjects reveal that, despite having more choices than ever, they face great uncertainty about desire, sexuality, and relationships. Ground-breaking and highly readable, Hard to Get offers fascinating insights into the many ways that sex, love, and satisfying relationships prove surprisingly elusive to these young women as they navigate the new emotional landscape of the 21st century.

In The Bells of Old Tokyo, Anna Sherman explores Japan and revels in all its wonderful particularity. As a foreigner living in Tokyo, Sherman’s account takes pleasure and fascination in the history and culture of a country that can seem startlingly strange to an outsider. Following her search for the lost bells of the city – the bells by which its inhabitants kept time before the Jesuits introduced them to clocks – to her personal friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, here is Tokyo in its bewildering variety. From the love hotels of Shinjuku to the appalling fire-storms of 1945 (in which many more thousands of people died than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki), from the death of Mishima to the impact of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011. For fans of The Lonely City, and Lost in Translation, The Bells of Old Tokyo is a beautiful and original portrait of Tokyo told through time.

The Journey Home is a collection of 100 poems written in the traditional poetic form of rhyme and time. Many of the poems are based upontruelife experiences, expressions of desperation and struggle, heartache and heart break, in the remembrance or thinking of either someone or a beloved pet, some are as aresult of an personal existing mood frame or purely based upon a factual point in time,some arepolitical view points or messages tothose involved inthe political systemand a few are entirely fictionalwrittensimplyfrom imagination. All of the combined poems are a journey through life, my life or our lives and the words are uniquely portrayed in perfect poetic context in rhyme and time creating a journey through life.. Each poem has a beginning, a middle and an ending whilst at the same time cleverly flows remaining on the subject matter without diversion. This book is the first book to express my minds abilities to write truely poetically and not merelyin prose, ode, or ballad form. Self contained structures all simple, easy to understand and read is the main aim whilst at the same time hopefully ensuring a message as concise as possible is given. These poems will be plondered upon undoubtedly and repetively for years to come by those who enjoy the love of poetry. The ability to both relate and correlate willbe experienced by thereader in not one of the poems but many of them. The undying devotion to create and express shines throughout this book from page to page and poem to poem.

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Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free--to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War--we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard. Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.