Freedom Burning

After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions. In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe, Freedom Burning explores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal- from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.

After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions.In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe, Freedom Burning explores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal— from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.

This is a book about freedom. Above all about the idea that there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been attained. What prison, after all, could be more secure than that deemed to be "the world," where boundaries of action and thought are assumed to define not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible. In the past we have been prisoners of tyrants and dictators, and consequently have needed to win our freedom in very concrete, physical terms. We now need to free ourselves not from a slave ship or a concentration camp, but from many of the illusions fostered in our democratic society. "[A] wise and acute analysis of the way our minds are controlled, not in a totalitarian state, but in a 'democratic' one. Edwards also suggests how we can escape this control in a self-help book which, unlike other books of this genre, connects our inner world of alienation with the world outside."--Howard Zinn "[A] treatise on what freedom truly means.... Burning All Illusions is an important philosophical and psychology text that should be on every political science curriculum reading list!"--Wisconsin Book Watch

This is the story of one man ́s-Vinayak Damodar Savarkar ́s- sacrifice of his name, fame, comfort, and family life in the fifty years of his quest for the freedom of his beloved motherland, India. It is the story of politics and power plays. Exposed here is the reality that lies behind the mask of Truth; exposed are the shenanigans of Mahatma Gandhi in the Freedom Movement of India. The reality is a far cry from the rosy picture presented by what passes as history. Here, Savarkar ́s life is creatively intertwined with a fictional character, Keshav Wadkar, taking the reader from the horrors of the Cellular Jail in 1913 to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Savarkar fought to preserve the integrity of India, to reinstate the honor of his motherland without ripping her heart out. For the emancipation of his beloved country and people, he suffered agonies and gross injustices at the hands of the British government, Gandhi-Nehru-led Indian National Congress, and the successive Governments of free India. That his contribution to India should be negated to bolster the political aspirations of any political party is unacceptable. The truth cannot-and shall not-be hidden!

Sean Cooper made headlines around the world when he paid off his mortgage at 30 on a house he bought just three years prior. In Burn Your Mortgage, Cooper-an acclaimed personal finance expert-clearly lays out his secret to success: simple yet effective lifestyle changes that anyone can make to pay down their mortgage sooner.

Onetime seemingly unstoppable boxing champion, victim of a false conviction for a triple homicide, and spokesperson for the wrongfully incarcerated, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter is a controversial twentieth century icon. In this moving narrative, Dr. Carter tells of the metaphoric and physical prisons he has survived: his poverty-stricken childhood, his troubled adolescence and early adulthood, his 19-year imprisonment with 10 years in solitary confinement, and the knowledge that his life was forever altered by injustice. A spiritual as well as factual autobiography, his is not a comfortable story or a comfortable philosophy, but he offers hope for those who have none, and his words are a call to action for those who abhor injustice. Eye of the Hurricane may well change the way we view crime and punishment in the twenty-first century.

In Burning for Freedom: A Theology of the Black Atlantic Struggle for Liberation, Delroy A. Reid-Salmon explores the reasons behind the abolition of slavery in the Black Atlantic World by examining the Sam Sharpe Revolt. Through this examination, secular bases for human liberation liberation theories that espouse socio-political reasons among the enslaved for wanting freedom as well as espouse human self reliance and sovereignty over their own lives are challenged. Instead, Reid-Salmon posits the belief that liberation in the Black Atlantic World was as a direct result of the manifestation of the work of God in human existence; the Sam Sharpe Revolt was theological act signifying the revelation and involvement of God in history to set the oppressed free.

The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.