A Voice From The South

"A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South" by Anna J. Cooper is a late 19th century book written by activist Anna J. Cooper. Recounting her story and the story of many like her, this book aimed to educate people on what life in the south was like for African individuals during a time when hardships were rampant.

Recently Anna Julia Cooper has emerged as the most important classic writer in the tradition of African American feminist thought. Mary Helen Washington described Cooper's work as "the most precise, forceful, well-argued statement of black feminist thought to come out of the nineteenth century." This is the first collection of all of Cooper's major writings, including many never before published. It includes all of the essays from her famous book, A Voice from the South, in addition to many other essays and letters accessible only in archives until now. The organization of this important new collection lends itself to a clearer understanding of the major themes and contributions of Cooper's thought, her development as a thinker and writer, and the critiques and controversies surrounding her work. Lemert and Bhan introduce Cooper as an activist, settlement founder, school teacher, college president, linguist, and scholar—a life that paralleled the prodigious accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois in so many ways.

Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent. May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.

Astonishing True Story of the Miracles That Are Changing Africa Born into a long line of witch doctors, Surprise ("Surpresa") Sithole was destined for a life of fear, oppression, and poverty in the jungles of Africa. But at the age of fifteen, he was awakened in the middle of the night by an unfamiliar voice. Urgent, but not harsh, it told him to get up and leave his family immediately. As Surprise stepped out into the night, away from everything dear to him, he had no idea who God was--or what he had in store for him. From miraculous signs and wonders to supernatural deliverance from certain death to divine revivals that overtook countries, Surprise has followed wherever God has led, becoming an agent of hope and change in a continent devastated by war, poverty, and spiritual oppression. Voice in the Night is the amazing true story of what began that night in a jungle hut more than twenty-five years ago: a journey--an adventure--of faith and miracles.

A Voice In Rama transports the reader into the brutality, tragedies and triumphs in the life of Jerusha, starting as a young widow of Bethlehem. It is a suspense-revenge story, experienced entirely through Jerusha’s eyes, ears and mind, though she is illiterate and speaks only Aramaic in a multilingual world. In a scene of absolute horror, Jerusha suffers through the slaughter of her three young sons during King Herod’s massacre of the Innocents. Jerusha shares the guilt, having secretly sacrificed her nephews and their mother in a doomed attempt to save her own children. Alone with her grief, Jerusha loses her Jewish faith and ethics. She claws her way up from beggary to wealth as a shady business-woman, to fulfill her plan of vengeance. Operating about Jerusalem, she joins the anti-Roman Zealots, to acquire the skills of an assassin, for which Jerusha finds she has a talent and passion. Among others, she kills Herod’s old officer of years before. Her ultimate target, however, is the “False Messiah” who had provoked the King’s order. Patiently, the aging Jerusha stalks Jesus among his followers, her dagger up her sleeve...

An “entertaining and occasionally even moving” personal recollection by the lawyer, historian, and renowned chronicler of old-money WASP society (The Boston Globe). At the time of his death, Louis Auchincloss—enemy of bores, self-pity, and stale gossip—had just finished taking on a subject he had long avoided: himself. His memoir confirms that, despite the spark of his fiction, Auchincloss himself was the most entertaining character he ever created. No traitor to his class, but occasionally its critic, Auchincloss returns to his insular society, which he maintains was less interesting than its members admitted—and unfurls his life with dignity, summoning family (particularly his father, who suffered from depression and forgave him for hating sports) and intimates. Brooke Astor and her circle are here, along with glimpses of Jacqueline Onassis. Most memorable, though, is Auchincloss’s way with those outside the salon: the cranky maid; the maiden aunt, perpetually out of place; the less-than-well-born boy who threw himself from a window over a woman and a man. Above all, here is what it was like to be Auchincloss, an American master, a New York Times–bestselling novelist, and a rare, generous, lively spirit to the end. “[Auchincloss] concentrates on bringing back to life—literary alchemy, after all—the people who loved him: his mother, father, aunts, uncles, school friends and colleagues. He understands how lucky he was to have them, and ‘A Voice From Old New York’ is his thank-you note.” —The New York Times