Cecil Brown

The son of Jewish immigrants, war correspondent Cecil Brown (1907-1987) was a member of CBS' esteemed Murrow Boys. Expelled from Italy and Singapore for reporting the facts, he witnessed the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and the war in North Africa, and survived the sinking of the British battleship HMS Repulse by a Japanese submarine. Back in the U.S., he became an influential commentator during the years when Americans sought a dispassionate voice to make sense of complex developments. He was one of the first journalists to champion civil rights, to condemn Senator McCarthy's tactics (and President Eisenhower's reticence), and to support Israel's creation. Although he won every major broadcast journalism award, his accomplishments have been largely overlooked by historians. This first biography of Brown chronicles his career in journalism and traces his contributions to the profession.

Although his story has been told countless times--by performers from Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, and the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and Taj Mahal--no one seems to know who Stagolee really is. Stack Lee? Stagger Lee? He has gone by all these names in the ballad that has kept his exploits before us for over a century. Delving into a subculture of St. Louis known as "Deep Morgan," Cecil Brown emerges with the facts behind the legend to unfold the mystery of Stack Lee and the incident that led to murder in 1895. How the legend grew is a story in itself, and Brown tracks it through variants of the song "Stack Lee"--from early ragtime versions of the '20s, to Mississippi John Hurt's rendition in the '30s, to John Lomax's 1940s prison versions, to interpretations by Lloyd Price, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, right up to the hip-hop renderings of the '90s. Drawing upon the works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, Brown describes the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality. This book takes you to the heart of America, into the soul and circumstances of a legend that has conveyed a painful and elusive truth about our culture.

A folk-taxonomy is a semantic field that represents the particular way in which a language imposes structure and order upon the myriad impressions of human experience and perception. Thus, for example, the experience of color in modem English is structured around an inventory of twelve "basic" color terms; but languages vary in the number of basic color terms used, from thirteen or fourteen terms to as few as two or three. Anthropological linguists have been interested in the comparative study of folk-taxonomies across contemporary languages, and in their studies they have sometimes proposed evolutionary models for the development and elaboration of these taxonomies. The evolutionary models have implications for historical linguistics, but there have been very few studies of the historical development of a folk-taxonomy within a language or within a language family. Folk-Taxonomies in Early English undertakes this task for English, and to some extent for the Germanic and Indo-European language families. The semantic fields studied are basic color terms, seasons of the year, geometric shapes, the five senses, the folk-psychology of mind and soul, and basic plant and animal life-forms. Anderson's emphasis is on folk-taxonomies in Old and Middle English, and also on the implications of semantic analysis for our reading of early English literary texts.

***WINNER, 2008 PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles National Literary Award Blacks have been vanishing from college campuses in the United States and reappearing in prisons, videos, and movies. Cecil Brown tackles this unwitting "disappearing act" head on, paying special attention to the situation at UC Berkeley and the University of California system generally. Brown contends that educators have ignored the importance of the oral tradition in African American upbringing, an oversight mirrored by the media. When these students take exams, their abilities are not tested. Further, university officials, administrators, professors, and students are ignoring the phenomenon of the disappearing black student – in both their admissions and hiring policies. With black studies departments shifting the focus from African American and black community interests to black immigrant issues, says Brown, the situation is becoming dire. Dude, Where’s My Black Studies Department? offers both a scorching critique and a plan for rethinking and reform of a crucial but largely unacknowledged problem in contemporary society.

Cecil John Rhodes made a fortune from diamonds and gold, became prime minister of the Cape, and had a country named after him, but his ambitions were far greater than that. When he was still in his twenties, after a meeting with General Gordon of Khartoum, Rhodes set up a Secret Society with the aim of establishing a new world order. The society, disciplined on Jesuit-style rules, became Rhodes’s lifelong obsession, and after his death it lived on and grew under the leadership of his executor, Lord Alfred Milner. The society played a key role in the governance of Britain during the Great War and the peace terms to end it, and it was linked to appeasement initiatives involving Hitler, the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson before World War II. Echoes of the Secret Society survive in different guises to this day, including the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Rhodes Scholarships. In The Secret Society, Robin Brown unpacks this astonishing and largely unknown history. He brings Rhodes, his companions and his successors to life by drawing from diaries and letters, and sheds new light on Rhodes’s homosexuality. Ranging from the diamond mines of Kimberley to the halls of power in Westminster, and peopled with characters such as General Gordon, Leander Starr Jameson, W.T. Stead, Olive Schreiner, the Princess Radziwill, Joseph Chamberlain and David Lloyd George, this book is a page-turner that will make you see the world, both past and present, in a different light.

'The Secret of the League' is a British dystopian novel by Ernest Bramah, which describes a successful overthrow of a democratically elected British Labour Party government by members of the upper classes, and depicts such an overthrow as being a positive and desirable outcome. In the fictional British history depicted in the book, the Labour Party wins an overwhelming majority in general elections and forms a government. They do not institute a completely socialist economy, but increase wages frequently, tax the upper classes greatly and create a large government bureaucracy. In foreign policy, the Labour Government is conciliatory towards other powers and curtails military spending. A powerful upper-class cabal (the "League" of the title), whose members feel that "the country is going to the dogs", makes careful secret preparations for overthrowing the government. Over two years, they secretly hoard large quantities of fuel oil and convert coal-burning plants to oil-burning. Then, they suddenly announce a consumer strike against the coal industry — at the time, a central part of the British economy — and cause large-scale unemployment and distress among coal miners and secondary industries dependent on coal.