Archives de catégorie : History

THE 1619 PROJECT: A VISUAL EXPERIENCE

An illustrated edition of The 1619 Project, with newly commissioned artwork and archival images, The New York Times Magazine‘s award-winning reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center of the American story.

THE 1619 PROJECT: A VISUAL EXPERIENCE
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
and The New York Times Magazine
Clarkson Potter, October 2024

Here, in these pages, Black art provides refuge. The marriage of beautiful, haunting and profound words and imagery creates an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act. –Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the Preface

Curated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this illustrated edition of The 1619 Project features seven chapters from the original book that lend themselves to beautiful, engaging visuals, deepening the experience of the content. The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience offers the same revolutionary idea as the original book, an argument for a new national origin story that begins in late August of 1619, when a cargo ship of enslaved people from Africa arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and understanding its powerful influence on our present can we prepare ourselves for a more just future.

Filled with original art by thirteen Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell, Xaviera Simmons, on the themes of resistance and freedom, a brand-new photo essay about slave auction sites, vivid photos of Black Americans celebrating their own forms of patriotism, and a collection of archival images of Black families by Black photographers, this gorgeous volume offers readers a dynamic new way of experiencing the impact of The 1619 Project.

Complete with many of the powerful essays and vignettes from the original edition, written by some of the most brilliant journalists, scholars, and thinkers of our time, The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience brings to life a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of American history and culture.

The 1619 Project began in 2019 as a special project from in The New York Times Magazine to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It is led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and New York Times Magazine editors Ilena Silverman and Caitlin Roper.

EDEN UNDONE d’Abbott Kahler

An incredible true story of murder, romance, and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park

EDEN UNDONE:
A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
by Abbott Kahler
Crown, September 2024
(via Writers House)

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.

As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

“One of my favorite writers has knocked it out of the park yet again. In EDEN UNDONE, Abbott Kahler has created a book as fantastic as the true story she weaves. With taut prose and sublime storytelling, she crafts an atmospheric page-turner, ominous and thought-provoking, with the best last line I’ve read in decades.” —Kate Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence

“In describing Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale, one is tempted to reach for handy literary or cinematic references. There’s a dash of Conrad. A bit of Hitchcock. Notes of Melville, Darwin, and Robinson Crusoe—and certainly more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies. But really, EDEN UNDONE is completely its own thing. Bizarre, mesmerizing, and compellingly tragic, Kahler’s fine book confronts an essential truth about those who ditch civilization: Try as we might, humans cannot elude the tyranny of our own nature.” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea

“Kahler (the author of previous books, including Sin in the Second City and The Ghosts of Eden Park, under the name Karen Abbott) has a gift for writing gripping histories that are both sensational and thoroughly documented. Possibly her wildest book yet.” —Booklist, starred review

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her debut novel, Where You End, was published January 2024.

THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF MUSIC d’Andrew Ford

From prehistory to now, the fascinating story of why music is vital to the human experience.

THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF MUSIC
by Andrew Ford
Black Inc. (Australia), August 2024

From award-winning broadcaster and composer Andrew Ford, The Shortest History of Music is a lively, authoritative tour through several thousand years of music. Packed with colourful characters and surprising details, it sets out to understand what exactly music is – and why humans are irresistibly drawn to making it.

This is not a traditional chronological account. Instead, Andrew Ford focuses on key themes in the history of music and considers how they have played out across the ages. How has music interacted with other social forces, such as religion and the economy? How have technological changes shaped the kinds of music humans make? From lullabies to concert halls, songlines to streaming services, what has music meant to humans at different times and in different places?

Andrew Ford OAM is a composer, writer and broadcaster who has won awards in each of those capacities, including the Paul Lowin Prize for his song cycle Learning to Howl, a Green Room Award for his opera Rembrandt’s Wife and the Albert H Maggs Prize for his large ensemble piece, Rauha. He has been composer-in-residence for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) and the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. In 2014 he was Poynter Fellow and visiting composer at Yale University, in 2015 visiting lecturer at the Shanghai Conservatory, and in 2018 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Ford has written widely on all manner of music and published ten previous books. He has written, presented and co-produced five radio series for the ABC and, since 1995, presented The Music Show each weekend on Radio National. He was awarded an OAM in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

BATTLEGROUND UKRAINE d’Adrian Karatnycky

A prominent foreign policy analyst details the power centers that shape modern Ukraine.

BATTLEGROUND UKRAINE
From Independence to the War with Russia
by Adrian Karatnycky
Yale University Press, June 2024
(via Liza Dawson Associates)

The first major English-language history of Ukraine from its emergence after the demise of the Soviet Union through the current Russian invasion.

In 1991, after seventy years of imperial Soviet rule, Ukraine became an independent country. Since 2022, it has been fighting for its survival by resisting an unprovoked, brutal, and ongoing invasion by Russia. At the center of its resistance is the resilience of a united people.

Adrian Karatnycky tells the history of how the Ukrainian state and nation gradually emerged through the tenures of the six presidents who have led Ukraine since the collapse of the USSR, including Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019.

Karatnycky shows that despite the influence of corrupt oligarchs, pressures from Russia, and the legacies of Soviet rule, a disparate but inclusive Ukrainian nation has emerged that inspires the world as it defends the principle that states have the right to their national sovereignty.

“Ukraine’s battle is our battle, so understanding its post-independence history is vital if the battle is to be won. Adrian Karatnycky has done an outstanding job of telling that story, warts and all.” –Bill Emmott, former editor in chief, The Economist, and Chairman, International Institute for Strategic Studies

“An indispensable history of contemporary Ukraine by a writer who is himself one of the builders of contemporary Ukraine. The point of view is intimate. The insights are astute. The sympathy extends to all who labored, fought, and sacrificed for a liberal, democratic, and European Ukraine.” –David Frum, the Atlantic

“Adrian Karatnycky has a knowledge of Ukraine that comes not only with reading history but also with making it. A participant in many key events in Ukraine’s recent past, in this important book, he provides unique insights into the rise of independent Ukraine and explains why the country and its people keep fighting when others gave up.” –Serhii Plokhy, Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University

“ Truly invaluable. Adrian Karatnycky’s knowledge of and personal feel for Ukraine— its leaders and its people—come through on every page. Want to make yourself an expert on the problem that will define Europe’s future for decades to come? Read this book!” –Stephen Sestanovich, Davis Professor of International Affairs, Columbia University, Former US Ambassador-at-Large to the Newly Independent States of the Former USSR

Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Through the council’s Ukraine program, as a labor union official, and as CEO of Freedom House, he has been deeply engaged in Ukraine for over three decades. He has written about Ukraine for leading newspapers and journals.

DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY d’Edward Dolnick

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods, a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history.

DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY
How An Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended The World
by Edward Dolnick
Scribner, August 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled on a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land. And if anyone had somehow conjured up such a scene, they would never have imagined that all those animals could have vanished, hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world.

In DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY, celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland, a kind of Doctor Doolittle on a mission to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom; and then on to Richard Owen, the most respected and the most despised scientist of his generation.

Entertaining, erudite, and featuring an unconventional cast of characters, DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY tells the story of how the accidental discovery of prehistoric creatures upended humanity’s understanding of the world and their place in it, and how a group of paleontologists worked to bring it back into focus again.

Edward Dolnick is the author of The Writing of the Gods, The Clockwork Universe, The Forger’s Spell, and the Edgar Award–winning The Rescue Artist, among other books. A former chief science writer at The Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives with his wife near Washington, DC.