The Red Land

The amazing, dramatic, and painful autobiographical story of Ange Zhang as he came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China. When Mao’s Cultural Revolution took hold in China in June 1966, Ange Zhang was thirteen years old. His father was a famous writer. Shortly after the revolution began, many of Ange’s classmates joined the Red Guard, Mao’s youth movement, and they drove their teachers out of the classrooms. But in the weeks that followed, Ange discovered that his father’s fame as a writer now meant that he was a target of the new regime. When his father was arrested, he began to question everything that was happening in his country. Finally, Ange was forced to join many other young urban Chinese students in the countryside for re-education where he found the emotional space to develop his own artistic talent and to find that he, like his father, was an artist — except that Ange’s talent lay in painting and drawing. This dramatic, painful autobiographical story is complemented by photographs, many drawn from Ange’s personal collection, as well as a non-fiction section that explains the historical period and is also illustrated with archival images. Key Text Features author’s note glossary Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.7 Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.

For thousands of years Egypt has crowded the Nile Valley and Delta. The Eastern Desert, however, has also played a crucial—though until now little understood—role in Egyptian history. Ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley feared the desert, which they referred to as the Red Land, and were reluctant to venture there, yet they exploited the extensive mineral wealth of this region. They also profited from the valuable wares conveyed across the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea ports, which originated from Arabia, Africa, India, and elsewhere in the east. Based on twenty years of archaeological fieldwork conducted in the Eastern Desert, The Red Land reveals the cultural and historical richness of this little known and seldom visited area of Egypt. A range of important archaeological sites dating from Prehistoric to Byzantine times is explored here in text and illustrations. Among these ancient treasures are petroglyphs, cemeteries, fortified wells, gold and emerald mines, hard stone quarries, roads, forts, ports, and temples. With 250 photographs and fascinating artistic reconstructions based on the evidence on the ground, along with the latest research and accounts from ancient sources and modern travelers, the authors lead the reader into the remotest corners of the hauntingly beautiful Eastern Desert to discover the full story of the area’s human history.

This is the first history of the Jewish agricultural colonies that were established in Crimea and Southern Ukraine in 1924 and that, fewer than 20 years later, ended in tragedy. Jonathan Dekel-Chen opens an extraordinary window on Soviet rural life during these turbulent years, and he documents the remarkable relations that developed among the American-Jewish sponsors of the ambitious project, the Soviet authorities, and the colonists themselves. Drawing on extensive and largely untouched archives and a wealth of previously unpublished oral histories, the book revises what has been understood about these agricultural settlements. Dekel-Chen offers new conclusions about integration and separation among Soviet Jews, the contours of international relations, and the balance of political forces within the Jewish world during this volatile period.

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox-the decades between 1920 and 1960-have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico-and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era. By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is generally acknowledged. The writers he focuses on-Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D'Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai)-are shown to be on par with writers of the preceding Progressive and the succeeding Red Power and Native American literary renaissance eras. Arguing that American Indian literary history of this period actually coheres in exciting ways with the literature of the Native American literary renaissance, Cox repudiates the intellectual and political border that has emerged between the two eras.

The Red Lands Survival Here Means Risking Death Bai Feng lived the life of a business graduate. He toiled his way up the corporate ladder, only to be cast aside by those with connections. Broken and demoted to a company branch in the country, he made an oath one night to live an average life--and then he woke up. In a fantasy world where the rich prey on the poor, capitulation leads to death, and creatures and demons of legends become real, Bai Feng must navigate through dangers from man and beast alike. But first he must come to terms with his new identity-- A starving twelve year old boy, residing in the village slums. Now called Chu, Bai Feng finds himself living alone in a rickety shack on the frontiers of an infant Empire. Malnourished and without a copper coin to his name, he realises he has transmigrated to face a torturous demise. Stifling his hunger, Bai Feng must climb out of poverty, while treating each step as his last. Join the young Chu as he strives to survive before he can explore this strange new world, and one day hope to earn the right to a surname. A gripping tale of a boy rising literally from the ashes to stamp his mark in a fantasy world.

In lucid narrative prose, Sean Kicummah Teuton studies the stirring literature of “Red Power,” an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. Teuton challenges the claim that Red Power thinking relied on romantic longings for a pure Indigenous past and culture. He shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities. Looking to the era’s moments and literature, he develops an alternative, “tribal realist” critical perspective to allow for more nuanced analyses of Native writing. In this approach, “knowledge” is not the unattainable product of disinterested observation. Rather it is the achievement of communally mediated, self-reflexive work openly engaged with the world, and as such it is revisable. For this tribal realist position, Teuton enlarges the concepts of Indigenous identity and tribal experience as intertwined sources of insight into a shared world. While engaging a wide spectrum of Native American writing, Teuton focuses on three of the most canonized and, he contends, most misread novels of the era—N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Through his readings, he demonstrates the utility of tribal realism as an interpretive framework to explain social transformations in Indian Country during the Red Power era and today. Such transformations, Teuton maintains, were forged through a process of political awakening that grew from Indians’ rethought experience with tribal lands and oral traditions, the body and imprisonment, in literature and in life.

This text explains the cultural and historical background to the fascinating and complex world of Egyptian myth, with each chapter dealing with a particular theme.

A fascinating, erudite, and witty glimpse of the human side of ancient Egypt—this acclaimed classic work is now revised and updated for a new generation Displaying the unparalleled descriptive power, unerring eye for fascinating detail, keen insight, and trenchant wit that have made the novels she writes (as Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels) perennial New York Times bestsellers, internationally renowned Egyptologist Barbara Mertz brings a long-buried civilization to vivid life. In Red Land, Black Land, she transports us back thousands of years and immerses us in the sights, aromas, and sounds of day-to-day living in the legendary desert realm that was ancient Egypt. Who were these people whose civilization has inspired myriad films, books, artwork, myths, and dreams, and who built astonishing monuments that still stagger the imagination five thousand years later? What did average Egyptians eat, drink, wear, gossip about, and aspire to? What were their amusements, their beliefs, their attitudes concerning religion, childrearing, nudity, premarital sex? Mertz ushers us into their homes, workplaces, temples, and palaces to give us an intimate view of the everyday worlds of the royal and commoner alike. We observe priests and painters, scribes and pyramid builders, slaves, housewives, and queens—and receive fascinating tips on how to perform tasks essential to ancient Egyptian living, from mummification to making papyrus. An eye-opening and endlessly entertaining companion volume to Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs, Mertz's extraordinary history of ancient Egypt, Red Land, Black Land offers readers a brilliant display of rich description and fascinating edification. It brings us closer than ever before to the people of a great lost culture that was so different from—yet so surprisingly similar to—our own.