The Energy of Slaves

The Energy of Slaves PDF Author: Andrew Nikiforuk
Publisher: Greystone Books
ISBN: 1553659791
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book

Book Description
“A robustly researched and smoothly written overview of the many challenges confronting our devotion to fossil fuels” from the author of Tar Sands (Quill & Quire). Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world’s most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion. In this provocative book, Andrew Nikiforuk, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, argues that what we need is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and truly human scale. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute “In his cautionary tale about the evils of oil . . . Nikiforuk makes his case for impending doom if we don’t mend our energy-spending ways.” —The Star “In this cogently argued book, Andrew Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor. Oil dependency, he writes, is a modern form of slavery—and it’s time for a global abolition movement.” —Taras Grescoe, author of Shanghai Grand “A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty.” —Ronald Wright, author of On Fiji Islands

The Energy of Slaves

The Energy of Slaves PDF Author: Andrew Nikiforuk
Publisher: Greystone Books
ISBN: 1553659791
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book

Book Description
“A robustly researched and smoothly written overview of the many challenges confronting our devotion to fossil fuels” from the author of Tar Sands (Quill & Quire). Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world’s most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion. In this provocative book, Andrew Nikiforuk, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, argues that what we need is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and truly human scale. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute “In his cautionary tale about the evils of oil . . . Nikiforuk makes his case for impending doom if we don’t mend our energy-spending ways.” —The Star “In this cogently argued book, Andrew Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor. Oil dependency, he writes, is a modern form of slavery—and it’s time for a global abolition movement.” —Taras Grescoe, author of Shanghai Grand “A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty.” —Ronald Wright, author of On Fiji Islands

The Energy of Slaves

The Energy of Slaves PDF Author: Leonard Cohen
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 077102472X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1972, The Energy of Slaves is Cohen's fifth collection, and one of his most controversial. A dark and intense book, described by one critic as "deliberately ugly, offensive, bitter, anti-romantic," Cohen considered it a document of his struggle—"I've just written a book called The Energy of Slaves," he told an interviewer at the time, "and in there I say that I'm in pain." Bracing, challenging, and equally beautiful and off-putting, it remains one of his most compelling and complex works.

Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom

Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom PDF Author: Calvin Schermerhorn
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421400367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
Traces the story of how slaves seized opportunities that emerged from North Carolina's pre-Civil War modernization and economic diversification to protect their families from being sold, revealing the integral role played by empowered African-American families in regional antebellum economics and politics. Simultaneous.

How the Word Is Passed

How the Word Is Passed PDF Author: Clint Smith
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316492914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book

Book Description
This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

The Other Slavery

The Other Slavery PDF Author: Andrés Reséndez
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544602676
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Get Book

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST | WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE. A landmark history—the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early twentieth century. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. “The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue...In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Résendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.” — Literary Hub, 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade ““One of the most profound contributions to North American history.”—Los Angeles Times

Modern Slavery

Modern Slavery PDF Author: Kevin Bales
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780740344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
Written by the world's leading experts and campaigners, Modern Slavery: A Beginner's Guide blends original research with shocking first-hand accounts from slaves themselves around the world to reveal the truth behind one of the worst humanitarian crises facing us today. Only a handful of slaves are reached and freed each year, but the authors offer hope for the future with a global blueprint that proposes to end slavery in our lifetime All royalties will go to Free the Slaves.

Slave Day

Slave Day PDF Author: Rob Thomas
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442468092
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Keene Davenport has called for a student walkout to protest his school’s annual “Slave Day” fundraiser, but it’s not exactly working. Shawn Greeley, the first African American student council president of Robert E. Lee High, continues to preside over the auctioning of student reps to serve as book-toters, chauffeurs, and lunch-fetchers for the day. So Keene chooses an alternative path of civil disobedience: Assuming that a day of degradation ought to open Shawn’s eyes, Keene decides to “buy” Shawn to be his slave, no matter what the cost—and launches a series of life-changing events in the process.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries PDF Author: Sean D. Moore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

Slaves to Do These Things

Slaves to Do These Things PDF Author: Amy King
Publisher: Blazevox Books
ISBN: 9781935402312
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Poetry. LGBT Studies. "'I'm portable. My mind travels / the verse and valleys of whole people' says the poet. Correct! Readers of this book will discover their own memories. They will melt in them, amazed, lullabied, dramatized, shocked that they exist. Amy King is a true bard"--Tomaz Salamun.

Song of Slaves in the Desert

Song of Slaves in the Desert PDF Author: Alan Cheuse
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1402263147
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Get Book

Book Description
Lyrically told and impeccably researched, Song of Slaves in the Desert traces the story of Nathaniel Pereira, a young New Yorker who's called to revive his uncle's South Carolina plantation. Nathaniel is struck by the sobering reality of slavery as he becomes captivated by the young slave Liza. Liza's never known the meaning of freedom, and as Nathaniel plunges into the murky mysteries of slavery, she can see how he might change her life forever. A masterful writer, Cheuse traces the thread of slavery from sixteenth-century Timbuktu and grapples with the wild nature of love.