Issue 5 - November/December 2011

Download current issue

Issue 4- September/October 2011

Download current issue

Issue 3 - May/June 2011

Download current issue

Issue 2 - March/April 2011

Download current issue

Issue 1 - January/February 2011

Download current issue

Issue 7 - December 2010

Download current issue

Issue 6 - October/November 2010

Download current issue

Issue 5 - September 2010

Download current issue

Issue 4 - June/July 2010

Download current issue

Issue 3 - April/May 2010

Download current issue

Issue 2 - February/March 2010

Download current issue

Issue 1 - January 2010

Download current issue

Issue 8 - December 2009

Download here

Issue 7 - October/November 2009

Download here

Issue 5, November/December 2011

Download current issue

Issue 4, September/October 2011

Download current issue

Issue 3, May/June 2011

Download current issue

Issue 2, March/April 2011

Download current issue

Issue 1, January/February 2011

Download current issue

Issue 6, November/December 2010

Download current issue

Issue 5, September/October 2010

Download current issue

Issue 4, June/July 2010

Download here

Issue 3, April/May 2010

Download here

Issue 2, February/March 2010

Download here

Issue 1, January 2010

Download here

Issue 6, December 2009

Download here

Issue 5, October/November 2009

Download here

IRC Newsletter on Women's History Month, March 2010

Download here

Information Resource Center Newsletter on 2010 Black History Month

Download here

Bilbiography on Native Americans (November 2009)

Download here

Native American Heritage Month

Native American Heritage Month -November 2011

National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month is celebrated every November to recognize the intertribal cultures and to educate the public about the heritage, history, art, and traditions of the American Indian and Alaska Native people.

This photo gallery provides a look at an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington that illuminates the enduring relationship between American Indian tribes and horses over the past five centuries.

Thanksgiving: A Favorite U.S. Holiday (A Handout)

Download here

Outine of U.S. History

A chronological look at how the United States took shape -- from its origins as an obscure set of colonies on the Atlantic coast a little more than 200 years ago into what one political analyst today calls "the first universal nation." This fully illustrated edition has been completely revised and updated by Alonzo L. Hamby, Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio University.

 Here is the last chapter of this publication:

The Politics of Hope

 Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, in September 2008.

Having served two terms, President George W. Bush was constitutionally prohibited from being elected again to the presidency. After a spirited preconvention campaign, the Republicans chose as their candidate Senator John McCain of Arizona. A Vietnam veteran respected for his heroic resistance as a prisoner of war, McCain possessed strong foreign policy credentials and was a relatively moderate conservative on domestic issues. He chose as his running mate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Much admired by Christian evangelicals and cultural conservatives, she drew almost as much attention as McCain himself.

In late 2007, it seemed nearly certain that the Democratic nomination would go to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The wife of former president Bill Clinton, she had quickly established herself as a leading member of Congress and possessed a strong national constituency among women and liberal Democrats. However, she faced a phenomenon not unusual in democratic societies — a relatively unknown, but charismatic, challenger whose appeal rested not on ideological or programmatic differences but on style and personal background.

Barack Hussein Obama was only in his second year as a U.S. senator from Illinois, but his comparative youth and freshness were assets in a year when the electorate was weary of politics as usual. So was his multicultural background. He was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, to a Kenyan father studying at the University of Hawaii and a white mother originally from a small town in Kansas. In 1963, the senior Obama left his new family to pursue graduate study at Harvard and later to return to Kenya. When Obama was six his mother remarried and relocated to Indonesia, where Obama briefly attended a Muslim school. He eventually returned to Hawaii, living with his maternal grandparents while he attended a private U.S. high school. He went on to study at two of the best universities in the United States — Columbia and Harvard. His personal style mixed a rare speaking talent with a hip informality that had great appeal to younger voters. Americans of all ages could consider him an emblematic representative of their society’s tradition of providing opportunity for all.

After a close, hard-fought six months of party caucuses and primary elections, Obama eked out a narrow victory over Clinton. He made Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware his vice-presidential selection. Most measures of popular sentiment indicated that the public wanted a change. The two candidates began the fall campaign season as strong favorites.

Any chance that McCain and Palin could pull ahead was ended by the sharp financial crisis that began in the last half of September and sent the economy crashing. Caused by excessive speculation in risky mortgage-backed securities and other unstable investments, the crash led to the bankruptcy of the venerable Lehman Brothers investment house and momentarily imperiled the entire financial superstructure of the nation. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), created during the New Deal, shut down numerous banks without loss to depositors, but had no jurisdiction over the giant financial investment companies that did not engage in commercial banking. Moreover, it had only limited capabilities to deal with those corporations that did both.

Fearing a general financial meltdown reminiscent of the darkest days of the Great Depression, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve engineered a Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) that was funded by a $700 billion congressional appropriation. The TARP program kept the endangered investment banks afloat. What it could not do was stave off a sharp economic collapse in which millions of U.S. workers lost their jobs.

That November, the voters elected Obama president of the United States, with approximately 53 percent of the vote to McCain’s 46.

OBAMA: THE FIRST YEAR

Obama was inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, 2009, in an atmosphere of hope and high expectations. In his inaugural address, he declared: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” He proclaimed an agenda of “remaking America” by reviving and transforming the economy in ways that would provide better and less-expensive health care for all, foster environmentally friendly energy, and develop an educational system better suited to the needs of a new century.

Speaking to the international community, he pledged U.S. cooperation in facing the problem of global warming. He also delivered a general message of international engagement based on compassion for poorer, developing countries and respect for other cultures. To Muslims around the world he said, “We seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

The speech revealed the wide scope of Obama’s aspirations. His rhetoric and his strong personal presence won wide approval — so much so that in October, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his goals. But, as always in the complex system of American representative government, it was easier to state large ambitions than to realize them.

At home, the administration addressed the mounting economic crisis with a $787 billion stimulus act designed to bring growing unemployment down to manageable levels. The legislation doubtless saved or created many jobs, but it failed to prevent unemployment — officially estimated at 7.7 percent of the labor force when Obama took office — from increasing to a high of 10.1 percent, then receding just a bit. The loans to large investment and commercial banks begun during the Bush administration with the objective of restoring a stable financial system were mostly repaid with a profit to the government, but a few remained outstanding as the president began his second year in office. In addition, the government invested heavily in two giant auto makers — General Motors and Chrysler — shepherding them through bankruptcy and attempting to reestablish them as major manufacturers.

Obama’s other major objective — the establishment of a national health care system — had long been a goal of American liberalism. With large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, it seemed achievable. However, developing a plan that had to meet the medical needs of more than 300 million Americans proved extraordinarily difficult. The concerns of numerous interests had to be dealt with — insurance companies, hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and the large majority of Americans who were already covered and reasonably satisfied. In addition, a comprehensive national plan had to find some way to control skyrocketing costs. In the spring of 2010, the president signed complex legislation that mandated health insurance for every American, with implementation to take place over several years.

In foreign policy, Obama sought to reach out to the non-Western world, and especially to Muslims who might interpret the American military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a general war on Islam. “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition,” he told an audience at Cairo University. In Tokyo, he reassured Asians that America would remain engaged with the world’s fastest-growing region. While hoping to distinguish itself in tone from the Bush administration, the Obama government found itself following the broad outlines of Bush’s War on Terror. It affirmed the existing agreement to withdraw American troops from Iraq in 2011 and reluctantly accepted military plans for a surge in Afghanistan. In his Nobel acceptance speech, President Obama quoted the celebrated American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that evil existed in the world and could be defeated only by force.

At the conclusion of his first year in office, Obama remained, for many Americans, a compelling personification of their country’s ideals of liberty and equal opportunity.

AFTERWORD

From its origins as a set of obscure colonies hugging the Atlantic coast, the United States has undergone a remarkable transformation into what political analyst Ben Wattenberg has called “the first universal nation,” a population of almost 300 million people representing virtually every nationality and ethnic group on the globe. It is also a nation where the pace and extent of change — economic, technological, cultural, demographic, and social — is unceasing. The United States is often the harbinger of the modernization and change that inevitably sweep up other nations and societies in an increasingly interdependent, interconnected world.

Yet the United States also maintains a sense of continuity, a set of core values that can be traced to its founding. They include a faith in individual freedom and democratic government, and a commitment to economic opportunity and progress for all. The continuing task of the United States will be to ensure that its values of freedom, democracy, and opportunity — the legacy of a rich and turbulent history — are protected and flourish as the nation, and the world, move through the 21st century.

My Town

My Town: Writers on American Cities features 12 American authors describing how the U.S. cities where they live contribute to their creativity. Pete Hamill offers a touching reminiscence of growing up in New York, Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley introduces the reader to his hometown of Baltimore, and best-selling author Jonathan Kellerman describes "the sprawling, inchoate alternative-universe" that is Los Angeles. Also featured are portraits of Boston, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis, Miami, and Washington, D.C.

 Here is an excerpt of this publication:

Son of Brooklyn By Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill writes about how growing up in Brooklyn influenced his career as a reporter and author. He describes the uniqueness of New York with special care and reverence.

Pete Hamill is a novelist, journalist and essayist. The author of 10 novels, in addition to biographies, a memoir, and collections of short stories and journalism, he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. His journalism has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, and Vanity Fair, and he was for many years a columnist on the New York Daily News and the New York Post. He also served as editor-in-chief of both the News and the Post. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Every writer starts as a reader, and I had the great good fortune to be a reader from a time before memory. There was no classroom epiphany, no moment of breakthrough when I could decode these small symbols called letters and make them into words and have the words form pictures in my mind. That meant, almost surely, that my mother taught me to read.

My mother and father were immigrants to New York from Northern Ireland, Catholics from the hard, dark industrial city of Belfast. They came separately and settled in the huge, beautiful borough of Brooklyn. In those years, Brooklyn was a place of blue-collar workers, immigrants and their sons, who worked off the commerce of the port. The subways made it possible for them to work in one place and live in another, and Brooklyn was special: filled with what I later thought was a Vermeer light. Even the tenements looked beautiful at certain hours of the evening, or at dawn. In New York City, the sun rises in Brooklyn, announcing the day. No wonder the Dutch loved it so.

Life was not easy for Billy Hamill and his wife Anne Devlin. Back in the Old Country, my father had finished the eighth grade. My mother had completed the equivalent of high school, but when she came to America at 19, an orphan, she arrived in 1929 with perfect Irish timing on the day the stock market crashed. In 1927, my father was playing a Sunday game of semi-pro soccer when he was kicked viciously, hauled to a hospital, spent the night sedated, and in the morning, with gangrene racing through the ruined leg (and penicillin not yet invented), he lost his leg above the knee. My mother worked in a department store and then as a domestic, caring for the young child of a well-off family in Brooklyn. They met at a dance in 1934. A fact that made my father laugh years later, since nobody could dance much with a wooden leg. I was their first American child, and there would be seven of us by the time the family was fully formed. That surely meant that Anne Devlin Hamill had time to sit alone with me and show me a book, and read it to me while one of her fingers traced the words.

One of my favorites was “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I must have loved the rhythms of the words and the illustrations and the way they combined to make a luminous childhood world. In some ways the verses resembled the Irish songs my father would sing when friends or neighbors arrived in our flat. Songs with stories. Some of them filled with martyred heroes. Most of them full of defiant laughter.

For many of those childhood years, we lived in a Brooklyn tenement, in a cold water railroad flat. I was born in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, but I have no memory of brutal hardships. There was always food on the table. I had many friends from the block, or from school. I learned the street game of stickball, played with a stripped broom handle and a pink rubber ball called a “spaldeen” (a corruption of the manufacturer’s name, which was Spalding). On some Saturday mornings, we began playing at eight o’clock, as the sun spilled over us from Prospect Park, and were still playing at dusk. There was no television then but on days of rain, there were other diversions. The Saturday morning movies were 12 cents until noon and we cheered for cowboys and marveled at the vistas of the American West. In the middle of the war, I discovered comic books and loved “Batman” because his Gotham resembled my Brooklyn, with its deep shadows, ominous warehouses, sinister cobblestoned alleys. But even better, I loved an immense (to my eyes) stone palace of wonder three blocks from our house: the Prospect Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Again, my mother took me there for the first time, and the second, and probably the 10th. She showed me the children’s room with its immense carved fireplace, made certain I got a library card, explained alphabetical order, and started me on a life as a writer. I was astonished when I learned I could bring home books that were on those low shelves. I devoured the Babar books, wishing I could meet an elephant in a green suit, and go with him to some city called Paris. A city that did not look at all like Brooklyn.

By the third grade I was visiting the library on my own (it was considered shameful to need your mother to walk you anywhere, but particularly to school). I didn’t know until decades later that it was put there by my favorite rich guy, Andrew Carnegie. At the same time, a teacher at my grade school (her name was Miss Smith) ordered us all to copy the maps of the war from the pages of the New York Daily News (then 2 cents a copy). I learned from that task where North Africa was, and France and Germany and England and Italy and, of course, Ireland. I realized how immense the Pacific was, and where Guadalcanal was, and Midway, and Japan too. The teacher reminded us that many of the young men from our neighborhood were in those places, and that when we saw a gold star in a window it meant that one of them had been killed. By the end of the war, there were gold stars all over that neighborhood, and many more across the country.

When we finished making the maps, she told us to start reading the stories too. And then to canvas our neighbors and get addresses for the men who were off at the war. Then we wrote letters to them, even if we didn’t know them, thanking them for all they were doing to keep us free.

That word “free” was in the air. I’d hear my father’s friends arguing about something, and even a guy who disagreed would say, “Hey, it’s a free country.” It seemed to mean a lot to them, and after a while I understood that most of them had come from countries that were not free. Places where they suffered for their religion. Places where you could not speak your piece, as they said, without hearing a knock on the door at midnight. My mother and father always spoke their piece. In bigoted Belfast, that wasn’t possible. In America, my father never bellowed. The male style of Northern Ireland was defined for me decades later by the title of a poem by the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” In America, they could say whatever the hell they wanted to say. They didn’t need to shout.

All of those free spirits, those factory workers, firemen, ironworkers, dock wallopers, taught me many things, most of which have survived in my writing. You could be tough, without being mean. If you looked for trouble, you would usually find it. The most important thing in life was work. And the unforgivable sin (after cruelty) was self-pity. My father lived to be 80, and I only heard him regret the loss of his leg once. My mother worked too. She had to, in order to raise a large family during lean times. Neither of them had time for self-pity. They were too busy. Each worked until they could work no more.

During this time, before the end of the war, I was reading the sports pages of the newspapers, too, and the great narrative strips of the time: “Dick Tracy”, “Smilin’ Jack”, and above all “Terry and the Pirates”. The last was my mother’s favorite, and I cut out each day’s strip and pasted it into a scrapbook for her. I didn’t fully understand the strip, because its superb creator, Milton Caniff, wrote and drew “for the guy who bought the paper.” But I began to inhale some basic principles of narrative: this happens, and this happens, and as a result, THIS happens.

I could draw well enough to copy the great villains from Dick Tracy, and sketch a reasonable version of Fat Stuff from Smilin’ Jack. I could never draw the Dragon Lady. But around this same time, another important event happened. I read a book that was all text and got to the end. The book was not from the library but from a bin at a used comic book store a few blocks from where we lived. It was called “Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Giant Cataract” and it swept me off to the Amazon jungle, where a boy my age, survivor of a plane crash, was in search of his lost father. In the years after the war, I began buying every copy of this series, usually for 10 cents, traveling in my mind to exotic places and facing immense dangers. A dozen Bomba books are stacked on my shelves to this day. The writing is sometimes racist (“Bomba knew that white blood flowed in his veins”), but I didn’t notice at the time. I wanted to know what happened next.

And at the library I was long past Babar. I found my way to Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, full of lush illustrations, stolen treasure, swordfights on the decks of galleons — and up ahead were Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexander Dumas. There was never enough money in our flat, but I lived an amazingly rich childhood and adolescence. After all, I sailed to Treasure Island with Jim Hawkins. I fought the agents of Milady at the side of D’Artagnan. I spent one entire summer as the Count of Monte Cristo. Classic Comics were my Cliff Notes, except that they served more as a reading guide than a cheat sheet, provoking searches in the library for the actual books. I didn’t just look at those books; I entered them; I lived them.

Years later I read an essay by Stevenson in which he urged aspiring writers to read like predators. I realized that long before I formed any ambition to be a writer I was doing just that. And I wasn’t alone. For aspiring writers, as well is the serious reader, great literary works are food. They nourish the imagination, provoke curiosity about the lives of others, make clear that a vast world exists beyond your own parish. Great books also ask implied questions of the reader that only the reader can answer. Questions about the meaning of their own lives. About the moral choices each of us might face. About the consequences of choice and actions. By the time I was 12, I wanted to be a comics artist. The more I read of great works of history and literature, the more such an ambition faded.

Now that I am old, I wonder sometimes if I’d have become a writer had I been brought up in the glorious landscapes of the American West, or in dark Belfast. It’s a question I can’t ever answer. If I’d had the same parents, perhaps. But I had the geographical luck to rise to consciousness in the densely layered world of Brooklyn, with its secrets, its variety of religions and ethnicities and languages, its codes of conduct. From our rooftop, I could see the towers of Manhattan, scraping the sky. My own version of Oz. I see it still as a son of Brooklyn. There were few saints on those Brooklyn streets, and many sinners, but then sin is always a better story. It was also the time before television, which by its nature is a passive medium. You can sit in front of the screen and do no imaginative work at all. The music tells you what to feel. The laugh tracks guide your laughter. Reading is active. It requires attention to these little squibbles of letters, formed in words, and the experience is completed by the reader’s own imagination. They can make you see the streets of your own part of the world, or take you to the Giant Cataract. They remind us always that first we imagine, and then we live.

That was underlined for me about 20 years ago. As a reporter, I had covered the fall of the Communist regime in Prague, a thrilling revolt led by a writer. When that extraordinary story climaxed, and Vaclav Havel went to the Castle, my wife and I left for Berlin. It was a morning nasty with rain. I had arranged for a driver to take us into Stalinist East Berlin, and we passed through the Brandenburg Gate into one of the ugliest cities in Europe. I had been there 15 years earlier, and it was now even worse. The architecture of enforced paranoia was everywhere.

We pulled into a wide main street and after a few blocks, we saw on our left a long line of people in heavy coats, four or five across on the sidewalk, many with umbrellas.

“What is this?” I asked the driver. “Are they waiting for food, or something?”

“No,” he said in a low, emotional voice. “Today is the first day that the books have come from the West.”

And I had to struggle against tears.

Prominent Hispanic Americans in the Arts

Hispanic names can be found in any survey of prominent U.S. writers, painters, sculptors, actors, singers, filmmakers and fashion designers. These men and women are inspired by the complexity and richness of their American experience combined with their Latin American roots.
 

Women of Influence

This collection chronicles how 21 notable American women broke new ground, some by championing equal rights for all and others by their accomplishments in fields such as government, literature, and even in war.
 

Free At Last - The U.S. Civil Rights Movement

FREE AT LAST - THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

This book recounts how African-American slaves and their descendants struggled to win — both in law and in practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. It is a story of dignified persistence and struggle, a story that produced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimately succeeded by forcing Americans to confront squarely the shameful gap between their universal principles of equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, and oppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.