Showing results by narrator "J. D. Jackson" in All Categories

Exploring the creative process of an American original, the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series will uncover the hidden history behind the author’s best known novels...and his most mysterious and ambitious unfinished works. In this second volume, Beau L’Amour examines how his father made the transition from struggling pulp writer to successful novelist and uses his father’s notes, journal entries, and correspondence to continue the process of seeking out how and why many of these never-before-seen manuscripts were written.

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether?

A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of more than 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network.

Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.

Experience the height of the Jazz Age through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most notable authors in American literature. This collection includes: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby.

Heaven may not be what you think it is. We often think of heaven in two extremes: It's either a dreamy existence where we float around on clouds with nothing much to do, or it's something far off in the future that we don't want to happen until we accomplish all that we want to in this life. Both of these are flat wrong, and Tony Evans looks to scripture to set the record straight. Simple and straight forward, Eternity is a short book on what eternity with God will really be like.

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. They are little known to history: Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; Charles B. Ray, a black minister. At great risk they operated the Underground Railroad in New York, a city whose businesses, banks, and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy.

The city of Austin, Texas, "is fearfully dull", wrote young Will Porter to a friend in the spring of 1885, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dead of night." Years later Will Porter would become the most famous writer in America - O. Henry, the toast of New York. The long-ago Austin servant girl murders would remain unsolved. But behind the O. Henry pen name, Will Porter was a man with secrets.

Telling the remarkable tale of a man who is still remembered on the streets of New Orleans and in the hearts of professional-wrestling fans, this book aims to restore the overlooked Junkyard Dog to his proper place in the history books. In 1979, Sylvester Ritter, also known as the Junkyard Dog, managed to break one of the final color barriers in the sport by becoming the first Black wrestler named undisputed top star of his promotion, and this biography reveals all the famous feuds and business back stories that made him a wrestling legend.

Drawing on the entrepreneurial life lessons Taulbert learned from his uncle Cleve, Who Owns the Ice House? chronicles Taulbert’s journey from life in the Mississippi Delta at the height of legal segregation to being recognized by Time magazine as "one of our nation’s most outstanding emerging entrepreneurs". Who Owns the Ice House? reaches into the past to remind us of the timeless and universal principles that can empower anyone to succeed.

Thomas Johnson and Charles Spurgeon lived worlds apart: Johnson, an American slave, born into captivity and longing for freedom and Spurgeon, an Englishman born into relative ease and comfort but, longing, too, for a freedom of his own. Their respective journeys led to an unlikely meeting and an even more unlikely friendship, forged by fate and mutual love for the mission of Christ. Steal Away Home tells a previously untold story set in the 1800s of the relationship between an African-American missionary and one of the greatest preachers to ever live.

Born into “the blessings of liberty in a free State,” Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Bayou Boeuf region of Louisiana’s Red River Valley. Twelve Years a Slave is the chronicle of his captivity at the mercy of sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps, who tested Northup’s tenacity and self-control under the most brutal conditions. Until fate brought a Canadian abolitionist to Epps’s farm, Northup thought he would never draw another free breath.

Tim Scott, an African-American US senator, and Trey Gowdy, a white US congressman, won’t allow racial lines to divide them. They work together, eat meals together, campaign together, and make decisions together. Yet in the fall of 2010 - as two brand-new members of the US House of Representatives - they did not even know each other. Their story as politicians and friends began the moment they met and is a model for others seeking true reconciliation.

You know the Super Soaker. It's one of the top 20 toys of all time. And it was an accidental discovery that brought it into being. Trying to create a new cooling system for refrigerators and air conditioners, inventor Lonnie Johnson instead created the mechanics for the iconic toy. A love of rockets, robots, and inventions and a mind for creativity were present in Lonnie Johnson's early life.

This is the story of a murderous con-man who has killed, amongst others, the ex-wife of Sheriff Buck White. White's vow of vengeance is diverted by a series of missing persons cases. The investigation uncovers a pattern behind the murders of lonely and wealthy women.

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, a young White man, attended the Wednesday evening Bible study at the predominantly Black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. An hour later, Roof pulled a concealed weapon and killed nine African Americans as they prayed, including Myra Thompson, the wife of Reverend Anthony Thompson. This audiobook is the account of Reverend Thompson's wife's murder, the grief he experienced, and the radical choice to forgive the killer. But beyond that, Reverend Thompson casts a compelling vision of the power of forgiveness to transform our lives.

Meet 44 of America's most impressive heroes in this collective biography of African American figures authored by the team at ESPN's TheUndefeated.com. From visionaries to entrepreneurs, athletes to activists, the Fierce 44 are beacons of brilliance, perseverance, and excellence. Bringing household names like Serena Williams and Harriet Tubman together with lesser-known but highly deserving figures such as Robert Abbott and Dr. Charles Drew, this collection is a celebration of all that African Americans have achieved, despite everything they have had to overcome.

The last scion of a once-powerful political family, Worcester mayor John O'Toole has his sights set on vastly higher aspirations. When night-shift paramedic Thomas Archer uncovers a secret that could upend the mayor's career, O'Toole is set on silencing him and sends Eamon Conroy, a brutal former cop, to ensure the truth remains under wraps.

This is the inspiring story of an African American whose athletic and entrepreneurial achievements - from being the first Black quarterback and head coach in the National Football League to founding one of the first all-Black investment securities companies - were equaled by his courage in confronting racial barriers.

In 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas, then part of the British Empire. Shortly afterward, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau set the rescued captives free. In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Frederick Douglass Prize–winner Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet incident—as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the next decade—resulted in the British Crown making reparations payments to a U.S. government that strenuously represented slaveholder interests.