Showing results for "Learning English" in Freedom & Security

Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway to freedom and, in some instances, a tool for inspiring revolt. And few governments tried harder to suppress literacy than did those in the South. Everyone understood that knowledge was power: power to keep a person enslaved in mind and body, power to resist oppression. In the decades before the Civil War, Southern governments drove Black literacy underground, but it was too precious to be entirely stamped out.

Preparing for the next war at an unknown date against an undetermined opponent is a difficult undertaking with extremely high stakes. Thus, outside of their own combat, militaries have studied foreign wars as a valuable source of battlefield information. Through a series of in-depth case studies of the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, Brent L. Sterling creates a better understanding of the dynamics of learning from "other people's wars", determining what types of knowledge can be gained from foreign wars, identifying common pitfalls, and proposing solutions.

A Lie Too Big to Fail asserts the idea that a government can never investigate itself in a crime of this magnitude. Was the convicted Sirhan Sirhan a willing participant? Or was he a mind-controlled assassin? It has fallen to independent researchers like Pease to lay out the evidence in a clear and concise manner, allowing listeners to form their theories about this event. Pease places the history of this event in the context of the era and provides shocking overlaps between other high-profile murders and attempted murders of the time.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

Uncovers the key civil rights battle that immigrant children fought alongside the ACLU to ensure equal access to education within a xenophobic nation Journalist Jo Napolitano delves into the landmark case in which the School District of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was sued for refusing to admit...

It was the 1960s - a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the “Help Wanted” ads were segregated by gender and the “Mad Men” office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the “Swinging Sixties.” Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job - for a girl - at an exciting place. But it was a dead end.

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in expanding American democracy. In The Power of Black Excellence, Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1865.

Deaths resulting from interactions with the US criminal legal system are a public health emergency, but the scope of this issue is intentionally ignored by the very systems that are supposed to be tracking these fatalities. In order to make a real difference and address this human rights problem, researchers and policy makers need reliable data.

Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they're wooing higher-level academics.

America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia.

Where do journalists find the guts to keep telling the truth in places where truth-telling will get them murdered? Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters sans frontières bring us the death toll from around the world, and that number is truly daunting: since 1992 more than 730 journalists have been killed - nearly three-quarters of them targeted and murdered. Over 85% of the fallen have been local journalists trying to unveil violence and corruption in their own back yards. Worse, 95% of the people who ordered their murder remain unpunished.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement wants to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media wants a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama—drop by bloody drop—in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, or break them, or find loopholes to work around them.

In Not a Day Care, Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and author of the viral essay, "This Is Not a Day Care. It's a University!" takes a hard look at what's happening around the country - including the demand for "safe spaces" and trigger warnings at universities like Yale, Brandeis, and Oberlin - and digs in his heels against the sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit.