#they teach the revolutionary war so many times in school

[runesinthenight]

We've literally been killing people to resolve policy differences and express a viewpoint since the begining. That is in fact a thing we historically do.

[arcielee]

Interview With a Writer

It is that blessed time when the wonderful and talented Miss Maggie, @inthedayswhenlandswerefew, gives us some behind-the-scenes insight to her latest brilliant narration. [Feel free to check out the Spotify playlist of all the songs mentioned and let me know if I forgot one!]

Here is masterlist to my Interview With a Writer series and the other talented individuals who allow me to continue this self-indulgent series! 💜 Picture(s) source.

Name: inthedayswhenlandswerefew

Story: 1968

Paring: modern Aemond Targaryen x female!reader, modern Aegon Targaryen x female!reader

Warnings: 18+ mature themes. Be mindful of chapter warnings.

Where did the idea for 1968 come from?

I am a high school social studies teacher by trade, and my absolute favorite class to teach is American History. The 1960s and 70s were actually one of my weak spots when I got my first teaching job back in 2020, so I ended up researching a lot about that period of time and got absolutely obsessed with it. In my American History class, I spend a whole lesson on JUST 1968, because so many important events happened in that year that are emblematic of broader trends and tensions.

One day I was re-reading one of my favorite books, The Other Mrs. Kennedy by Jerry Oppenheimer, which is specifically about Bobby Kennedy’s wife Ethel, but also gives a lot of insight into the Kennedy family generally and what it was like to live through that era. The idea of using this setting as a fic AU occurred to me, and I ruminated on it for a few weeks while finishing up Napoleonville.

Eventually, I had a revelation of the ending of 1968 (true to my usual pattern), and then knew I’d have to write the fic! I was actually really worried about all the political and historical details being too boring and/or confusing (especially for non-U.S. readers), so I was relieved that so many people gave it a chance. 🥰

Honestly, it was brilliant with the similarities to the Kennedys and Targaryens in the story. Were there any historical cameos in 1968 that you enjoyed channeling? Or perhaps struggled with?

I find LBJ super fascinating, and I feel that because of the Vietnam War he really doesn’t get a fair assessment when people look back on his presidency. His work for civil rights and the Great Society (SNAP, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, PBS, etc.) was truly revolutionary, and as someone who grew up in poverty and benefitted from a lot of those programs, I don’t think LBJ’s contributions get the recognition and praise they deserve. I perceive him as a haunted sort of figure, and I really enjoyed his cameos. (To be clear, he was also super problematic and bizarre personally, and I don’t mean to excuse any of that 😂).

As for someone who was difficult to write about…honestly, the George Wallace research I did was super depressing, so while he was necessary to include, I didn’t really enjoy working on those parts!

Was there anything in specific that inspired your Reader portrayal?

Io is a bit of a composite sketch. Ethel Kennedy was known as doggedly committed to her husband’s career above all else (despite eventually being the mother of 11 children!!), and I think that inspired Io’s single-minded determination to help Aemond win the election in the first few chapters. Ethel was traditional in the sense that her husband was the center of her world and made all the important decisions, as was expected of women of her social class in that time period. But Io is also a manifestation of the counterculture of the late-60s. She is young, educated, genuinely progressive politically, and likes to party. She tries to reconcile the expectations of her family/time period and her actual personality by intentionally choosing a husband with whom she can have an equal partnership making the world a better place. And…we all know how that worked out.

[Photo Ethel and Bobby Kennedy, m. 1950]

Can you explain your interpretation of Aegon? How does he compare and contrast to Aemond? What drives them? Why are they the way that they are?

In 1968, Aegon is 40 years old, and so his role in the Targaryen political dynasty is very well-established: once his family realized he couldn’t be weaponized for their purposes, he was largely disposed of, and lives this aimless, uninspired, self-loathing sort of existence. He does have some genuine love for his family—missing Daeron and feeling guilt over him being sent to Vietnam, a vague sort of fondness for Mimi and the kids, distress when Aemond is shot in Palm Beach, an apology of sorts to Alicent by performing “Mama Tried” at her birthday party—but Aegon exists on the periphery, and he knows this, and while he doesn’t want to be a politician the rejection still stings.

At first, he perceives Io as yet another person who makes him feel inadequate and unloved; and in fairness, she is cruel to him, in fact more so than Aegon is to Io in return. It is noteworthy that in Chapter 1, she viciously criticizes Aegon in front of everyone in the waiting room (“if someone had to get killed tonight it should have been you”), but he doesn’t return fire until they are alone (the infamous cow comment), and even then he seems to regret it immediately.

Aegon, fundamentally, is more sad than mean. When in Chapters 2 and 3 Io abruptly reveals herself to be someone who is vulnerable, wounded, abandoned, and kind of a hippie lowkey, Aegon begins to perceive her differently, and she becomes an opportunity for him to be truly understood, protected, and loved for the first time in his life.

I think we would all describe Aemond as ambitious and ruthless, determined to prove that he is the best to compensate for deep, lifelong insecurities. He is a progressive politically because he sees a path to build a winning coalition, and perhaps in small part because of the whole Greeks-being-despised immigrants thing. But in 1968 there is a sense that you never fully understand who he is as a person. This is intentional! 1968 is Io’s story, and she never gets to see the whole Aemond. She sees parts of the picture, but never the full image. As awful as he is to Io, there is also a side of Aemond that truly (even if in an…unorthodox way 😂) loves Alys and their child, and there are clues that Alys understands him like no one else can (that Ouija board message… 👀). He’s by no means a good guy, but he is multifaceted. I think the stress of the presidency, and his long separation from Alys, ends up softening Aemond a bit, hence him defending Io’s reputation and ultimately letting her go.

Did anything inspire your other OCs? Specifically "The Ones Who Married In" club?

I didn’t sit down and plan what sorts of characters would be in the “The Ones Who Married In” club. I was possessed by these random visions of them: a perpetually drunk Mimi, a perhaps not too bright but very sweet Fosco, and Malibu Barbie but make her Polish Ludwika, and I was thinking: “These people are ridiculous, this will never work!” But then when I thought about it more, I realized that Mimi, Fosco, Ludwika, and Io all serve strategic roles to help advance Aemond’s career, and so it would make sense that Otto and Aemond cobbled them together and shoved them into the family portraits. I ended up really loving them, but they weren’t a big part of my original outline for 1968. 🙂

How would Io rate them based on her friendship with each of them?

Fosco is definitely #1; they connect on an emotional level that is deep but also largely unspoken. Ludwika is a close #2; she’s Io’s shopping buddy but also witty, supportive, and very feminist in her own way. And then Mimi is a distant #3. Io pities Mimi and feels loyalty to her as a fellow Targaryen, and goes out of her way to try to protect Mimi from her own self-destructive tendencies. But Io, as a collected and self-reliant person, also has difficulty understanding and dealing with someone as messy as Mimi. And of course, once Io realizes she is super into Aegon, that creates some one-sided resentment of Mimi!

Do you have a feeling of what happened after chapter 12? What is the ending you vaguely see with Aegon and Io? What about Aemond and Alys?

Where I end a fic is really the last clear image I see of the characters, so I sadly don’t have a lot of specifics to offer. What I do feel is that Io and Aegon have children of their own (like, several children, maybe even 5+ children) and Aegon is present for their early years in a way he wasn’t able to be for his kids with Mimi. Io is a stepmom to Aegon’s OG kids and has a good relationship with them, but she’s only really close with Cosmo.

I also sense that Aemond has basically no contact with Io or Aegon, which makes sense considering his abuse of Io and the lifelong fury Aegon would therefore have towards him. Aemond is happy with Alys and their son (as happy as someone like him is capable of being); he does the ex-president thing and settles into a largely ceremonial role and advises Democratic politicians, although he is not very friendly with President Reagan.

And then my wild theory is that a Daeron/John McCain ticket ends up winning the 2000 election and the War On Terror plays out completely differently!

And finally... 1968 seemed to pour from you like a fever dream. Does this mean something else might be coming to continue the Maggie's Suffering Sunday tradition?

1968 did seem to fly by, despite it being a longer fic at 12 chapters! I do have something planned for this Sunday... 😉 All I can say for now is that it is very weird, totally unexpected, and tonally a mashup of Comet Donati and When The World Is Crashing Down.

Does that seem impossible?? Think again 😏 I will be reblogging hints until Sunday! I hope you enjoy this new journey 🥰🐍

[eretzyisrael]

by Christopher Rufo

Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of the state teachers’ union that encourages its more than 4,500 members to “Teach Palestine!” (The union did not respond to a request for comment.)

The lesson plans are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel. The recommended resource list also includes a “sensory guide for kids” on attending protests. It teaches children what they might see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at protests, and promotes photographs of slogans such as “Abolish Prisons” and “From the River to the Sea.”

In kindergarten through second grade, the ideologies intensify. The teachers’ union recommends a lesson, “Art and Action for Palestine,” that teaches students that Israel, like America, is an oppressor. The objective is to “connect histories of settler colonialism from Palestine to the United States” and to “celebrate Palestinian culture and resistance throughout history and in the present, with a focus on Palestinian children’s resistance.”

The lesson suggests that teachers should gather the kindergarteners into a circle and teach them a history of Palestine: “75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin,” the lesson reads. “There’s a BIG word for when Indigenous land gets taken away to make a country, that’s called settler colonialism.”

Before snack time, the teacher is encouraged to share “keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs” with the children, and have them create their own agitprop material, with slogans such as “FREE PALESTINE, LET GAZA LIVE, [and] PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” The intention, according to the lesson, is to move students toward “taking collective action in support of Palestinian liberation.”

The recommended curriculum also includes a pamphlet titled “All Out for Palestine.” The pamphlet is explicitly political, with a sub-headline blaring in all capital letters: “STOP THE GENOCIDE! END U.S. AID TO IRSAEL! FREE PALESTINE!” The authors denounce “Zionism’s long genocidal war on Palestinian life” and encourage students to support “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” policies against Israel.

The pamphlet includes chants that teachers can adopt in the classroom. Some imply support for militancy and political violence: “Resistance is justified when people are occupied!”; “We salute all our martyrs! mothers, fathers, sons and daughters!”; “Justice is our demand! No peace on stolen land!”

It’s not immediately clear to what extent the “Teach Palestine!” lessons have been adopted in Portland public school classrooms. But the teachers’ union claims that the district has been “actively censoring teachers” for promoting pro-Palestine ideologies; in response, it has assembled a legal guide for how teachers can keep promoting the lessons under the guise of meeting state curriculum standards.

[docpiplup]

Period dramas- El Mestre Que Va Prometre El Mar (The teacher who promised the sea) (2023)

7,7/10 ⭐ on IMDB

The film focuses on the life of Antoni Benaiges , a teacher from Mont-roig del Camp, in the Baix Camp, in Tarragona, Catalunya, who in 1935 was sent to the public school in Bañuelos de Bureba, a small town in the province of Burgos, Castilla la Vieja (Castilla y León). Little by little, and thanks to a pioneering and revolutionary teaching methodology for the time, he will begin to transform the lives of his students, but also that of the town, which is not always to everyone's taste.

It's based on the book of the same name by Francesc Escribano and has been adapted for the big screen by Albert Val, and its director is Patrícia Font.

To tell the story of Antoni Benaiges (Enric Auquer), the film interweaves past and present and the master's story will be known through the eyes of Ariadna (Laia Costa), a woman looking for her great-grandfather who disappeared during the Civil War.

The producers of the film wanted to emphasize the essence of this exciting story: " 'El mestre que va prometre el mar'  is a great story that has been unfairly forgotten for many years. With this film we are repairing an oblivion and at the same time valuing the work of the republican teachers and recognizing the struggle of so many people who still continue to search for their relatives buried anonymously in mass graves. An exciting and fully valid story.

Part of the technical team is made up of David Valldepérez, director of photography; Josep Rosell, art director; Dani Arregui, editor, and Natasha Arizu, composer, among other professionals.  

The film is shot for six weeks in various locations in the demarcation of Barcelona, in Mura, and in Briviesca (Burgos). It is a production of Minoria Absoluta, Lastor Media, Filmax and Mestres Films AIE. 

RTVE and TV3 participate and it has the support of the ICAA and the ICEC . Filmax is in charge of distribution to cinemas.

Length: 1 h 45 min

Premiere: November 10th 2023

Cast

Enric Auquer: Antoni Benaiges

Laia Costa: Ariadna

Luisa Gavasa: Charo

Ramón Agirre: Adult Ramón

Gael Aparicio: Carlos

Alba Hermoso: Josefina

Nicolás Calvo: Emilio

Antonio Mora: Mayor

Milo Taboada: Priest Primitivo

Jorge Da Rocha: Camilo

Eduardo Ferrés: Rodríguez

Alba Guilera: Laura

Laura Conejero: Rosa

Xavi Francés: Education inspector

David Climent: Falangist Chief

Felipe García Vélez: Adult Carlos

Elisa Crehuet: Adult Josefina

Padi Padilla: Encarna

Alicia Reyero: Ángeles

Gema Sala: Jacinta

Alía Torres: Ariadna's daughter

Carlos Troya: Bernardo Ramírez

Arnau Casanovas: Portraitist

Laura Gaja: Elvira

María Escoda: Juana

Chus Gutiérrez: Archivist

Joan Scufesis: Sergio

Cristina Murillo: Residency nurse

Sara Madrid: Hiker

Pep Linares: Falangist waiter

Albert Malla: Radio announcer

Izan Barragán: Leandro (School boy)

Didac Cano: Casimiro (School boy)

Hernán Gracia: Eulogio (School boy)

Noa Guillén: Asunción (School girl)

Ona Macía: Saturnina (School girl)

Elena Moreno: Dionisia (School girl)

Gal-La Petit: Hilaria (School girl)

Genís Lama: Falangist

[readychilledwine]

Incoming extra long post 💜

Pushing something a little different today-

Let's talk banned and challenged books

Warnings- this post is going to mention racial and gender issues, violence, and use some foul language. I do not graphically discuss anything, but I want that warning out there right away.

I've gone through 5 different banned/challenged books lists, and I wanted to share with you my favorite books on these lists and why I think everyone should read them.

I want to start with WHO creates the banned book lists and what it is. The banned or challenged book list is a list of books that are not allowed within a school district, and sometimes, when pushed hard enough, public libraries. It is meant to limit access to materials deemed "explicit in nature." It's not made by the government. It's parents and average people create these lists and typically threaten schools if they teach from them or offer these books to kids in libraries. I fully believe and support parents having the right to ease their kids into adult topics, but challenging your kid is the point of school.

I did notice there's common themes in the books on these lists

Race and race theory is discussed in the books

Mental health is discussed in the books

Body autonomy is discussed

The women's rights movement, LGBTQ+ movement, BLM, or any other minority movement it discussed

The book is critical of the government or religion

The book discusses war and the toll it plays

Slavery is ACTUALLY discussed

The book contains sexual content (consensual or nonconsensual)

The book questions society norms

Magic (Yes. Magic)

This list is updated almost weekly in some school districts, and 99% of the time, it is not to remove a book. It is to add one.

A few of these I won't discuss in as much detail in fear I will risk a community guidelines report, but I wanted to discuss some of them and why I love them.

Always keep in mind that you alone are responsible for your reading intake, and check your triggers on all the books mentioned. I will be posting my personal feelings on which age I feel the books are appropriate for as well. I also have not read a few of these in a bit, so hopefully, I have everything as accurate as possible!

If the ✨️ emoji is by the book, it's one of my personal favorites. Like, I may have multiple covers and editions favorite, or it is a book I frequently think about, or it holds a special place in my heart. Without further ado, I present to you Elizabeth's 21 favorite banned books in no particular order:

Maus by Art Spiegelman - banned for discussions of violence, torture, and death- This is a comic book/graphic novel series based on the author's father, who was a Polish Jew and is a survivor of the Holocaust. It is gut-wrenching. It is disgusting. It is heartbreaking. I do not recommend it for anyone under 16, but I personally think it's okay to be uncomfortable and learn from the past.

✨️Animal Farm by George Orwell - banned for open criticism of the government - I LOVE Animal Farm. Animal Farm is based on the Russian government/monarchy being overthrown (which is why it surprises me that it is banned in so many districts in the US.) In summary, animals over throw their human masters and create a society of their own. It is meant to challenge and discuss the fact that no matter how small a person is, the revolutionary mindset is a powerful one. I highly recommend Animal Farm to 16+.

✨️Beloved by Toni Morrison (get used to her name. You'll see it one more time. I could make a post solely on her.) -banned for violence, SA, realisitic depictions of segregation and slavery - Beloved is about the treatment of black women in the south during and after slavery, and how things circled for them. This book has haunted me since I read it at 15. I'm 27 now. Toni is a superb writer who truly pulls at your heart with her stories. I do not feel this book should be banned. What happened in the United States needs to be discussed openly to work on the racial divide. Please consider reading this if you haven't, and if you have siblings 16+, let them read it as well and have an open discussion with them on how it made them feel. This is one I also recommend checking triggers for.

Burned by Ellen Hopkins (you'll see this name several times, too. I'm shocked her name isn't plastered as the first thing on every list honestly) - banned for questioning religion and parental figures - I also love Ellen Hopkins. I have paid to listen to her lecture several times. I love the way she writes. I love her willingness to challenge society. I love her openly discussing hard topics. This book is one of those topics. It is about a young group of kids sent to what my brain thinks is a religious reformation camp in Nevada. They are supposed to be finding salvation and redemption in Christ, but instead find love and acceptance in each other. There's a few heavy topics (the whole book is heavy. Her books, in general, can be heavy). I'd recommend it to anyone 14+.

Call of the Wild by Jack London - if you're my age and grew up in the American School system, take all the time you need to process the fact that this book is on all 5 of the lists I looked at- banned for animal cruelty and violence - this was required reading when I was in school. I was 12. It is focused on the Klondike Gold Rush, and arguments could be made that it is more based on the treatment of animals at that time. I do not feel I should have been exposed to this at the tender age of 12, but I tend to carry more sympathy towards animals than I do people. I feel safe saying 15+ with discussions being had regularly.

✨️ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - banned for challenging the government and violence - I have chills as I am getting ready to write about this book, tears are welling up, this is my coming of age novel. It is one of the books I read by choice in high school that actually began my question everything and look at all angles mindset. I can not recommend this book enough. It is about book and media censorship and a dystopia based society where common practice is to burn books, a real thing that has happened in so many countries, on government orders in order to keep the general population conformed and uneducated. It discusses the consequences of that on society and humanity, it discusses the dangers of rebellion against that mind set, and I could not put it down. 15+. Please please please read this book if you never have. Especially as an adult who can recognize the behaviors discussed in the book and how it parallels modern society

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernst Hemmingway - banned for discussions of war - this book graphically discusses the consequences of war. I am not overly comfortable getting too far into it. I will say, this one will shatter you if you are an immeserive reader who gets so into a book it becomes your surroundings and reality instead of just a pleasure reader. Please read with caution. 17+

Lord of the Flies by William Golding - banned for violence and language (I personally think there's more reasons and those two are the scapegoats) - again, if you are my age, take the time to process your shock. This book centers around children who survive a plane crash on an island and are forced to create their own society and government, and it quickly goes to hell in a hand basket. Everything from sex, to racism, to discrimination against disabilities (does it sound familiar yet) is discussed and challenged by the groups formed in this book. 15+ with supportive discussions

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - another one for people my age to go "wait what" to - banned for "depressing themes" and "antibusiness" - this book discusses the tragic lives of two migrant works and the conditions they were forced to endure. It's main lesson is about humanity and compassion. This is a really educational book that I feel should be in classrooms. 14+

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins - banned for SA and sexual nature - this one I would not recommend to anyone under 17. It is about teens trapped in sex work. Please check your own triggers before reading this.

✨️The Crank Triology by Ellen Hopkins (Crank, Glass, and Fallout) - banned for open discussion of drug use and addiction - these novels are actually based on the life of the author's daughter and her downwards spiral into m3th addiction. They are heartbreaking (fallout will hit you HARD if you have friends who are the kids of an addict or you are a child of a parent who is an addict). They were the first books I read by her, and I am sad to say I live in a community where they were banned hard enough that it passed to all three school districts and the public library. 16+ and please check triggers

Hold your breath, my loves. ✨️A Court Of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas -banned for sexual content, violence (domestic and situational), and ✨️magic use✨️ - if someone can explain to me why this is the only book from this series I've found on a banned/challenged list and why NONE of the Throne of Glass books are on them, I'm all ears. Do I think your 13 year old should be reading this? F no. A 16 year old, though? Yes. Let them have that Rhys Crease in those paperbacks. I'd rather my kid read smut than watch it. Also, kudos and congrats to SJM for being a banned author in 12 school districts, thus making her one of the top bans for the 2022-2024 school years. There's some great authors and novels on this list. It was pretty cool to get to include her.

✨️The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison - banned for race theory, racism, abuse - oof. This one is hard. Be ready to cry if you read it. It takes place after the Great Depression in the US and is mainly about a young black girl. It centers a created inferiority complex she developed because, due to societal norms regarding beauty, She does not see beauty in herself and her skin. Definitely 14+. Definitely should be read in classrooms as it is one of the most powerful books I've read that centered on black women and their voices that need to be heard.

✨️ Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur - banned for sexuality and representing the feminist movement - this one is quite frankly insulting. This is a poetry novella about healing and finding power inside of yourself as a female and finding your self-worth. It's banned in 10 districts, making it part of the top 10 bans. I might actually cry over this one being banned. My daughter will read it 14, and we're going to discuss it. I think it is that worthy and powerful. I will leave you with my favorite quote from this one "I am not a hotel room. I am home. I am not the whiskey you want. I am the water you need. Don't come here with expectations and try to make a vacation out of me."

✨️ The Catcher in The Rye by JD Salinger - banned for teen rebellion - this is the first book I gave to my younger brother that I thought would resonate with him, he still has that torn up, creased, and notated copy that was passed from my mother to our big brother, then to me, and now to him. He told our parents once he's pretty sure it saved his life. This book centers around 16 year old Holden after he is expelled from school. He begins to challenge adults and societal norms regarding children. It critiques a superficial society and brings to light the consequences of some choices we make. Teens can relate to this book. My siblings and I all did. This book has sat on a pretty much national ban list for far too long. It needs to be brought into classrooms, especially classrooms in schools with behaviorally challenged teens who've never found a book that speaks to their soul and feelings. 16+ with guidance and open discussion.

✨️I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing by Maya Angelou - banned for "bitterness and hatred toward white people" in the majority of the state Texas - break my heart harder, Maya. This is the only autobiography on I have on my tops list at the moment. It focuses on young Maya Angelou and the discrimination and racism she faced. There is so much symbolism and history to dive into with this book. Have tissues ready if you read this. 16+

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini - banned for open discussion of war and violence - another oof. This is another book I handed to my little brother and said, "Read this and get back to me." It was not one of my personal favorites until he sat me down and told me how the book made him feel. I genuinely wish I could have him typing this one out, but he's off doing his adventures and seeing the world. It is a beautiful coming of age novel set in the Middle East during the invasion of Soviet Russia to the United States and the downfall of the Taliban. It centers around the importance of paternal figures, friendship, and key relationships. 15+ there is a SA scene that is rarely mentioned on the banned books list so keep that in mind.

✨️The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - banned for discussions of childhood SA, pedophilia, and murder - one of my top 10 favorite books of all time. If you've watched the movie, please read the book. It is about a family struggling after their daughter is SA'd and killed by a serial predator, and it is told from the daughter's perspective in the afterlife and from the eyes of her family. You will go on a roller-coaster of emotions. Anger, sadness, joy. I really do love this book. I have a hardcopy for display purposes, and a paperback with a separate note book filled with notes, quotes, etc. 16+ just due to the heavy nature of it, but for a mature reader and personality 14+

✨️I want to scream from the rooftops on how bullshit this one is. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - banned for open discussion of segregation, racism, violence, and "general hatred towards white people - this book should be required reading. This book openly discusses consequences of false accusations based on race, it discusses the mistreatment of minorities, and it discusses a white superiority complex. It needs to be read and discussed, and I will die on that hill. 14+

This one also makes me want to scream✨️The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - banned for violence, alcohol promotion, anti business beliefs- this book is a classic and it brings to question a lot regarding income levels, old and new money, and financial segregation. It has beautiful symbolism that you have to be paying attention to catch, and is so much more than a Leonardo Dicaprio movie. 14+

It is with a heavy sigh and heart I introduce the next author: ✨️JRR Tolkien✨️ if I would have just listed his books, it'd be this whole list - banned for violence and ✨️magic use✨️ - these novels and short stories are the back bone of the modern day fantasy writer and have even created countless table top RP games. The fact that so many Middle Earth based novels are banned is almost a stab in the back to the idea that schools are supposed to push and celebrate growth, individuality, and knowledge. I have the Lord of the Rings and the books that prequel it on a pedestal. They are my comfort novels and go tos when I'm feeling down and truly want to lose myself into a well-done and built world. I recommend them to anyone who already loves Fantasy or wants to get into fantasy 15+

EDITED TO ADD ✨️Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - there's a lot of reasons this book is now banned, and I was just informed by my best friend she saw it had hit an official list - If you want science fiction mixed with anti war look no further. This book addresses a very deadly and tragic bombing in ww2 using a narrative from a character who is "stuck there" over and over again. Please really check triggers for this one. It's easily another 16+ book.

Theres a few books I came across on these lists I haven't read yet, but currently have in my cart to purchase. Do any of you have a favorite banned book? Are you interested in any of these books? If you are and have questions, please shoot me a message or comment. I'm always happy to discuss banned books. They're my favorites. 💜

[ivansergeyevichturgenev]

i like my mentor teacher and i'm learning so many things! and i especially like her classroom management strategy of NO BRIBES! but i'm angry at how social studies and science have been reduced in most k-5 classrooms and it like actually enrages me. for my entire elem experience, we had daily social studies and science instruction. if not in kindergarten, i know for a fact it was daily at least in first and beyond. DAILY. now it's been reduced to a 45 min block called "content" that teachers may or may not get to. i don't love standardized testing but tbh getting rid of the tests meant teachers and districts as a whole ditched science and social studies! it's crazy to me because research has shown time and time again that children's literacy suffers when they don't have the necessary background knowledge about the world AND the achievement gap widens when students don't get regular social studies instruction! and today we did a read aloud on the history of the us flag and one out of the only two black students raised his hands and asked if african americans were enslaved during the revolutionary war. (this school is 90% white.) and my mt responded yes, slavery did not end until later, and that we'd talk more about black history in FEBRUARY. i'm like actually really frustrated...black history shouldn't wait until february. in my classroom next year i'm injecting as much social studies as i can. and in my lessons here i might ask to do some social studies because this is a disgrace. i literally had a better social studies education in my rural elementary school even if it was problematic in a lot of its teaching. what????

[jlkendall33]

SUMMER - 1988 - JAMES KENDALL

My name is James Kendall, most people call me Jim, and I was born in Meade County, Kentucky on August 2, 1940. I have one brother that is three years younger. My family has lived in this section of Kentucky since the Revolutionary War. With travel being restricted in this area until after the nineteen hundreds, I am kin in some manner to most people in my county.

I have been married three times and have what is now popularly called an extended family. Children, stepchildren, grandchildren of all ages, children younger than their nieces and nephews, instead of an extended family it should be called a nightmare for a genealogist. Perhaps I should not complain too loudly, that may be what keeps me young in thought.

I enjoy travel, the new places and people that you can meet. Somewhere out there just might be the most beautiful scene or the most delightful person that you may ever meet. It would be a shame for that to never happen. Some of the most interesting people that I have ever seen are the very young and the extremely old, the young still have not had their imagination suppressed and the old are extremely versed in the experience of what will work in life.

My mother had a positive influence on my education, she had only an eighth grade schooling, and felt that for me and my brother to amount to anything, we should have a good education. I think that to some of my relatives, it is still debatable whether it succeeded or not in my case. I have attended Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro, Kentucky and the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading stories to me of places that were so very different from the way that we lived. I could read at the age of three and I feel that my mother reading to me and her encouragement was responsible for my reading at such an early age. I started to school much younger than most children. When I was six, the age that most children start to school, I was in the third grade.

Literature has been an important aspect of my life. I enjoy any form of well written fiction. I have written short stories and poetry every since I was a young child but my writing never had the polish and professionalism that I wanted it to have. I had a creative writing course in college, but the only thing that I felt that I got from it was that people do not talk in perfect English and form that school teaches.

I am interested in any form of new technology. Computers and satellite receiver equipment are two areas that I am involved in. I have some very strong feelings about these two forms of communication being the soap box in the park for the twentieth century and any effort to stifle these forms of communication is a dart spot on our Constitution. With interests in these areas, naturally science fiction would be one of my favorite forms of reading. Two of my favorite authors are Robert A Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard.  I think that Battlefield Earth by Hubbard is one of the most interesting and powerfully written science fiction books that I have ever read.

Another author that I greatly admire is a native of Kentucky, Jessie Stewart. I feel that his writings of his beloved state has helped people in other areas understand the people of Kentucky. To me he has a very descriptive method that paints a picture of his characters, as clearly as an oil painting by a master artist.  He is perhaps the one author that I would like to be able to duplicate in style. When I finish this course, if I could write with one tenth the clarity that Jessie Stewart did, I would be satisfied.

There are so many stories and tales in my mind that are waiting to be written, that at times I feel that they rule my life. I don’t feel that it would be a justice to the stories to write them in a form that would not be the best of my abilities.

Perhaps it is as Jessie Stewart once said of short stories, “in the future, short stories will be only for yourself and your family. There will not be a market for the general public”. If this were to be so, I still would like for my stories to be as well polished and professional as it possible for me to create.

I would like to be able to stir the emotions in people who would read my stories, if something that I write is funny, make them happy, if it is sad, make them cry, or any of the emotions between the two I would like to be able to have my writing read and like I said about Jessie Stewart, be able to say that I had painted a portrait with words. I  live in a very beautiful valley in the country and sometimes early in the morning the day breaks with such beauty that you can almost smell and taste the day come alive. I would like to be able to convey that taste and smell into written word.  This has not been an easy task for me. Of all of the things that I know and write about, Jim Kendall is on the bottom of the list

-written by James "Jim" Kendall

summer of 1988

[olderthannetfic]

Growing up in a socially progressive environment: How has this affected your feelings about success? Were you taught that forming a nuclear family played a role in that measurement? Or were you taught to value yourself strictly in terms of stuff like grades and academic achievements? Or maybe that whole talk was geared towards personal happiness, in whatever form it took for you?

Also, at school: did you have to do stuff like the pledge of allegiance? Was Columbus Day and history class transparent or did your teachers omit the fucked up parts?

--

The closest my mother ever came to advice about a nuclear family was: "Find a boyfriend after college. Roommates are awful."

(Though from what she said, this belief stemmed from being the one clueless white girl in an apartment with three black girls becoming politically conscious in 1970s Chicago. I'm pretty sure Mom was the annoying roommate in that scenario, so...)

She really didn't discuss success. I never asked, but I assume that this was a conscious choice the same as she never once mentioned my looks either positively or negatively. (I asked her about the latter, and she said it's something she'd decided on before having me.)

I've spent the last couple of years carting hundreds of pounds of books out of the house. Among them was a massive collection of child development books from the 70s through 90s. A lot of them were on topics like raising intellectuals rather than just kids who get good grades or fostering a sense of self worth and emotional self sufficiency.

My mom was an educator, and she disliked a lot of the status-obsessed ways people deform their children's senses of self. Grades = worth is not a message she'd ever have espoused, though she did send me to hard schools and expect me to do my work. She could be a school snob as much as anyone, but she didn't explicitly talk about success in those terms. I think a big part of it is that all of her friends from when she was young were intellectuals who wanted to be professors, found there were no jobs, and ended up as carpenters or in the Peace Corps or all kinds of other random things. My mother herself started a PhD in... epidemiology...? (Something sciencey anyway.) She bombed out when her much older sister died unexpectedly and ran off to Kathmandu to hang out with an old high school friend who was studying Tibetan Buddhist religious logic.

She was certainly concerned with me finding meaningful work and being self sufficient, but she just didn't talk in terms of "success".

And more than that, worth as a human is inherent. It has nothing to do with success. If you want to raise a strong person, you give a kid unconditional love, clear boundaries, and a sense of stability. You teach them that all humans are valid and worthwhile just because. They don't have to do anything to gain that. It just is.

Perhaps that's not how you meant "success", but I've seen far too many otherwise intelligent parents mutilate their children's ability to learn by treating education and knowledge as the source of value in the world and not as something pleasurable in their own right.

Perhaps happiness = success is closest to what my mother would have espoused, but really, being a valid human being is a separate axis from being happy or successful or any other particular measure of a life well lived.

--

None of my schools would have been caught dead making us say the pledge of allegiance. They were all hippie private schools. We did shit like learn to sing This Land is Your Land.

We spent a lot of time on Indigenous history—though still in a "That was long ago" kind of way that made me assume everyone was dead and gone. Genocide was mentioned often. Columbus was mentioned rarely, and not in positive terms.

I still wouldn't say it was particularly well-rounded history. I'd rather have learned more about the Mexican-American war and less about the utterly irrelevant snoozeville that is the American Revolutionary War. Frankly, as a Californian, I would reduce the Revolutionary war to "It happened" and our equally boring Civil War to the politically important parts that it was indeed fought over slavery as Southerners themselves said at the time, that all that noble lost cause shit is just a retcon by white supremacists, and anybody who repeats it in the modern day can fuck themselves.

We did have pretty good stuff on Harriet Tubman in second grade and lots on Japanese internment later. Some of the schools I went to were better than others, usually because they were less beholden to stuffing our heads with irrelevant garbage that's on major history tests. I could have done with slightly fewer traumatizing documentaries on the Holocaust though.

--

As for my personal feelings about success, towards the end of my 30s, I was looking around for what should come next. I decided to finally write a novel, and I feel a lot better about my 40s having done so. I wasn't desperate or self hating like a lot of people I see around me fearing aging, but I did feel a lack of accomplishment in a sense.

My next goal... well, my immediate next goal is to finish book 2 of my series, but in the longer term, my goal is to not just finish writing things but to become financially successful as a writer.

[nicklloydnow]

“That a certain segment of the internet would be so hungry for even a fleeting glimpse of Malick is not surprising. The director is as famous for his closely guarded privacy as his output. He has not given an on-the-record interview in nearly four decades. From 1978, when Paramount released Malick’s second film, the Panhandle-set Days of Heaven, until 1998, when his World War II epic, The Thin Red Line, premiered, Malick more or less vanished. Rumors circulated around Hollywood that he was living in a garage, that he was teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne, that he was working as a hairdresser. Even as he returned to filmmaking, was nominated for Oscars, won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palm d’Or, and doubled down on his experimental style (cinephiles will never stop debating his decision to punctuate a fifties Texas family drama with CGI dinosaurs in The Tree of Life), Malick continued to maintain his silence.

(…)

Malick was born in Illinois in 1943 and spent his boyhood mostly in Waco and Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the eldest of three brothers. His mother, Irene, was a homemaker who had grown up on a farm near Chicago; his father, Emil, was the son of Assyrian Christians from Urmia, in what is now modern-day Iran, and staked out a career as an executive with the Phillips Petroleum Company. Emil was aggressively accomplished, a multi-patent-holding geologist who played professional-level church organ and served as a choir director, and he pushed the young Malick to succeed on all fronts from an early age. (A Waco Tribune-Herald news brief from 1952 noted that “eight-year-old Terry” had “surprised his classmates at Lake Waco Elementary School by presenting a 43-page paper on planets.”) But Emil could be a stern taskmaster, and he and Malick often butted heads. “They had some conflicts over the years,” Jim Lynch, a close friend of Malick’s since high school, told me. “That’s one reason Terry came to St. Stephen’s.”

St. Stephen’s is known as the Hill, both for its steep topography and its aspiration to be an enlightened beacon (as in the biblical “city on a hill”), and Malick thrived in a culture that emphasized spirituality, intellectualism, and rugged individualism. “When I first got there, it was made known that he was the local genius,” Lynch told me. Malick had the highest standing in the class his junior and senior years, served in student leadership positions like dorm council, played forward on the basketball team, and, with Romberg, co-captained the football team, playing both offensive and defensive tackle, an accomplishment of which he’s still proud. (“He says that in football he was ‘the sixty-minute man,’ ” Linklater told me. “Ecky says that the only time he boasts is when he talks about his high school athletic prowess.”)

None of Malick’s peers—or, it would seem, Malick—had any inkling that he would stake out a career as a filmmaker, but he was already exploring many of the ideas that would animate his work. Students at St. Stephen’s went to chapel twice a day, and the spiritual education there was both rigorous and open-minded, with The Catcher in the Rye taught alongside more traditional religious texts in the school’s Christian ethics class. “It was religious in a broad humanities sense,” Lynch said, a conception that Malick embraced. “Terry doesn’t like anything sectarian or dogmatic,” Lynch added. “His grounding is more in a philosophical sense of wonder.”

(…)

After Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, Malick began experimenting with more-white-collar careers. He worked for a short time as a globe-trotting magazine journalist, interviewing Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier and spending four months in Bolivia reporting for the New Yorker on the trial of the French philosopher Régis Debray, who had been accused of supporting Che Guevara and his Marxist revolutionary forces. (Malick never completed the piece.) Then there was a year as a philosophy lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during which Malick concluded that he “didn’t have the sort of edge” required to be a good teacher. And finally, he moved to Hollywood, where he studied at the American Film Institute and quickly became an in-demand screenwriter, working on an early version of Dirty Harry, writing the script for the forgotten Paul Newman–Lee Marvin western Pocket Money, and making powerful friends like Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn and AFI founder George Stevens Jr.

But Malick wanted to make his own film, and he found a story he wanted to tell in the late-fifties murder spree of Charles Starkweather. Though Malick had never directed a feature, he insisted on total freedom and had few qualms about scrapping the production schedule when he became inspired to shoot a different scene or location, exasperating many in the crew. But when Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, opened at the New York Film Festival in 1973, Malick became an instant sensation. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it a “cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film” and wrote that the 29-year-old Malick had “immense talent.” (The Times also reported that getting Malick to talk about Badlands was “about as easy as getting Garbo to gab.”)

Soon, Malick began production on his follow-up, Days of Heaven, a tragic love story starring Richard Gere, Sam Shepard, and Brooke Adams set in the North Texas wheat fields where Malick had worked after high school. Badlands hadn’t been an easy shoot, but on Days of Heaven, Malick’s unorthodox approach had the crew on the brink of mutiny, and when the film finally came out, in 1978, the reviews were decidedly mixed, sometimes within the same review. “It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg in the New York Times.

Days of Heaven won an Academy Award for best cinematography, and it is now widely regarded as a masterpiece. (Roger Ebert, delighting in the stunning magic-hour photography and the poetic tone, would judge it “one of the most beautiful films ever made.”) But the experience of making the film had been so grueling for Malick that, according to Badlands producer Ed Pressman, “he just didn’t want to direct anymore.” The year after Days of Heaven premiered, Malick abandoned production on his next project, a wildly ambitious movie called Qasida that he’d hoped would tell the story of the evolution of Earth and the cosmos, and informed friends and colleagues that he was relocating full-time to Paris.

(…)

There is only one publicly available recording of Malick’s voice. Around halfway through Badlands, he makes the single on-screen cameo of his career, engaging in a brief, tense exchange with Kit Carruthers, the Charles Starkweather–like killer played by Martin Sheen. Malick speaks in a slow, soft, higher-pitched drawl. He is unfailingly polite, a little retiring, and warm without being chummy. Malick has one of those voices that lends itself to imitation—broad and regional and distinctive—and when I spoke with his friends and colleagues, I heard several versions of it. They all sounded like the Malick we see in Badlands.

Malick’s friends describe him as a generous and humble man with a capacious intellect and a child’s insatiable curiosity. He likes going deep on birding, cosmological events, and the interconnectedness of the natural world. (“You’ll be talking to him about butterflies in the Barton Creek watershed, and then he’ll start talking about the soil and all the soil insects,” said filmmaker Laura Dunn.) He enjoys discussing the fundamental questions that drive religious and philosophical inquiry and has a deep knowledge of the Bible. (Lynch remembers that after seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Malick—a fluent French speaker, with conversational German and Spanish—mentioned that he understood the film’s spoken Aramaic, because he’d grown up hearing it from his paternal grandparents.) And yet, as in high school, Malick can be just as down-to-earth as high-minded. He’ll show up for lunch at an unfussy cafe wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt and talk about football or gush about pop-culture schlock like the genetically-modified-shark movie Deep Blue Sea or drop a quote from Ben Stiller’s Zoolander. (After hearing that Malick was a fan, Stiller made an in-character happy-birthday video for the director.)

(…)

Malick is even more buttoned-up about his work. He politely shrugs off compliments about his films—which, in the old Hollywood style, he calls “pictures”—seemingly agonizing over flaws, missed opportunities, and bad memories of the production. “I’ll mention something like, ‘Hey, I heard there were some seventy-millimeter prints of Days of Heaven. And he’ll say, ‘Oh, gosh, when that opened, I was out of the country,’ ” Linklater said. “I think talking about his work takes him back emotionally.”

Laura Dunn, whom Malick recruited to direct The Unforeseen, a documentary about Austin’s development boom and the pollution of Barton Springs, told me that Malick finds it difficult to watch movies from start to finish. “He’s the kind of artist who seems almost tormented by his need to keep working on something,” she said. “If he’s sitting in a dark room, watching a movie all the way through, he’s restless because he’ll still be editing one of his own movies, or he’ll think about all the things he did that he regrets and wants to go back and change.”

(…)

Malick takes years to finish his films, hiring teams of editors to put together different cuts, and finding and discarding entire story lines during the post-production process. In the final cut of The Tree of Life, Malick resolves the drama at the center of the film by having his young protagonist’s family move away from his boyhood home. There’s a bittersweet sense of a chapter closing and an uncertain future lying ahead. But in an earlier, unreleased version of the film, the story of the protagonist, Jack, ends not with his family’s departure from Waco but on a more triumphant note: he arrives as a boarding student at St. Stephen’s. It doesn’t take a deep familiarity with Malick’s life story to see the parallels between the family in the film and Malick’s own. Jack bridles under the discipline of his stern, accomplished, and ultimately loving father. He worships his angelic mother. He and his two younger brothers turn to each other for support. The film is framed around the premature death of the middle brother. (Malick’s brother Larry took his own life as a young man.)

(…)

Malick’s silence has always seemed, in part, a way to resist such a reading. When Lynch mentioned to Malick that he saw the director’s last three features—The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Knight of Cups—as an “autobiographical trilogy,” Malick took umbrage. “He didn’t like me labeling them that way,” Lynch said. “He didn’t want people thinking that he was just making movies about himself. He was making movies about broader issues.” Malick might very well say the same of Song to Song, but nevertheless, it’s tempting to see his latest work as an extension of that discarded Tree of Life ending—the aging director offering a raucous love letter to the city that offered him inspiration as a boy and has sustained him ever since.”

[aureatescars]

muse

name: Alexander Kozachenko

nickname(s): Sasha, Buddy

age: verse dependent

race/nationality: Caucasian, Eastern European

place of birth: Holigrad, Eastern Slav Republic

gender: cis male

sexuality: demisexual

occupation: teacher (English, Math), former revolutionary

height: 190cm - (6 ft 3 in)

hair: dark brown

eyes: hazel

laterality: right-handed

~spoilers for Resident Evil: Damnation below.~

bio: Born and raised in Holigrad, today’s capital of the Eastern Slav Republic, Sasha always felt that he grew up as a child should: sheltered, surrounded by friends and loved ones, free to chase his dreams and ambitions under the watchful eye of a loving mother.

All things considered and even with the weight of an absent father hanging over him at times, his childhood was a happy one. Not least of all because of his two lifelong friends, JD and Irina, both of which did their part of keeping him hale and whole throughout.

It was true that they went along with most of his reckless ideas when they came to him. He had been a wild child. Easily excited, with sheer endless energy and a sense of adventure instilled in him by stories his mother read to him from as early as he can remember. More than once did their little group of friends butt heads with other kids. Sasha having been easy to anger back then, too. A weakness of his that persevered way into his adult years, only ever eased by Irina who always knew how to temper his anger when needed, and JD who lightened his mood when he lost himself to brooding after yet another squabble lost.

If asked today why he eventually chose the road that led him to teaching, he would be embarrassed to admit that in essence it had been Irina to push him towards it, telling him she was certain he would make a great teacher. And him, at the time already quite smitten with her, easily followed where she went, grateful for every hour spent studying together, for every minute spent talking about the years to come.

In the end, the story went as it always does: they fell in love, were happy, made plans for a joined future even before Sasha worked up the courage to ask Irina for her hand in marriage...

Sasha’s life was what people would call normal, maybe he’d even count as happier than some. Up until the day tragedy struck and in one fell swoop derailed his entire life and squashed any dreams of a future.

Unrest had been sown among his countrymen for years, even decades now. A civil war raged among the people, two parties grappling for power. The ruling class and the resistance. Rich against poor, an age old song that left nothing but blood and tears in its wake.

Sasha hadn’t been blind nor deaf to the state of his hometown, of his country, and yet the attack to the school during the middle of the day blindsided everyone, although he would go on to blame himself for years to come. He should have known. Should have done something --anything-- against the accusations voiced that the school housed a resistance cell, which in turn ultimately lead to the justification of an attack against civilians, against children. So many lives were lost that day, including Irina’s, leaving Sasha standing among the burned ruins of what was once his life.

Grief and anger no longer able to be held back by the soothing touch or kind words of his lover manifested themselves into the wish - no - the need for revenge, leaving him aching for what he perceived as justice, carving out a dark hollow place deep inside himself that left a grim and reckless determination to set things right.

He had never held a gun before joining the resistance under the guidance of a member of the Council of Elders, but he had always been a quick study. A natural they called him, but it was empty praise to him. Nothing mattered anymore other than ending the war with the resistance as the victor. His comrades said he fought like a man possessed, in awe of someone burning so brightly for their cause, not afraid to die in the line of duty.

Sometimes he wonders if he wasn’t simply tired of living.

He went through the motions for the longest time after joining the ranks. Killed when necessary, followed orders without question, but never without remorse. He still has nightmares about all the lives he took during that time, no matter how much he reasoned with himself that it had been for the right cause, for freedom at the time.

It was easier in the beginning, with the anger still fresh in his mind, but the longer the fight went on and the further the memory of his fiancée drifted into the past, the harder it got to justify his actions, and the more hopeless he felt. In the end, the conviction that he believed to be inherent to himself turned into a crutch, something to hide behind, to cling to, because if he wasn’t Buddy, the soldier, he was still Sasha, the man who lost everything.

Of course, fate has a weird way of pushing one onto a different path and so it happened that shortly after the resistance got their hands on the means to control what they called B.O.W.s an American government agent stumbled into his path just as the civil war came to a head in the capital.

Today, Sasha wouldn’t be able to recount all that led to him facing down enemies alongside the man who’s throat he had put a knife to upon first meeting him. The entire battle a haze of pain and rage and fear after he allowed the Plaga into his body and until this moment he can still not understand the motivations that had Leon Kennedy save his life not once, but multiple times throughout them making what he assument to be their last stand at the time.

It must have been pure adrenaline what kept him going throughout he thinks, that and the Plaga, the dominant species of a biochemically engineered parasite used to control the other B.O.W.s and it is also this which he blames for his spotty memory of the events.

But even so, he’ll never remember anything more clearly than the moment he tried to take his own life after the dust settled, fear of turning into one of those monsters running rampant in his mind, only to be stopped by Leon, the man staring him down with such conviction that even when he pointed a gun at him to rid him of the parasite that had attached itself to his spinal chord he felt overwhelming relief overshadow the gutwrenching anguish over knowing what was to come: pain, agony even and then more loss, the loss of his legs, maybe even more, he couldn’t know, but something in Leon’s eyes told him that he’d live..

That is my answer. And your answer.

[earnestly-endlessly]

Hi! Do you have any Cherik Army AUs? I've managed to find just 3.

Hi Anon, thanks for the ask. I found some good Army AUs, though some might not quite fall into the category of 'Army AU'. There are, surprisingly, few Army AUs that I have found, whereas there are several military and war AUs, but those don't necessarily involve an army. I did include a variety that involve an army in one way or another, though some fit the bill better than others. I hope you find some that you enjoy!!

Cherik Army AU

I Want to Guard Your Dreams And Visions – luninosity

Summary: I was reading Barbara Hambly’s Abigail Adams mystery novels, and then Erik/Charles American Revolutionary War AU happened. Little snippet in which they share a tent, drink coffee, and provide support to each other.

The Eggnog Riot – Sophia_Bee

Summary: 1826. The American Military Academy in West Point. The day after Christmas. Cadet Erik Lehnsherr wakes up naked with a certain cadet Xavier sprawled across his chest. He can only blame the eggnog.

No Man’s Land – ikeracity

Summary: It's 1914 in Ypres, Belgium. British soldier Charles Xavier has been in the trenches for four months of endless artillery fire, bone-deep cold, and constant fear of the enemy. But on Christmas Eve, the gunfire falls silent, and they climb out of their trenches for a Christmas truce. Charles, of course, meets Erik, the German soldier across the way.

My Land’s Only Borders Lie Around My Heart – pseudoneems

Summary: WW1 Christmas truce of 1914. Opposing soldiers Erik and Charles meet.

Le soldat – Iggyassou

Summary: Erik is in the trenches, trying to survive the war so that he can go back to Charles, his young lover waiting for him back at home.

Names – Squeegee

Summary: In the summer of 1917, British soldier Charles Xavier finds himself taking cover in a shell crater.

Not sure if the 'graphic' tag applies or not, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Quell a storm with pen and ink – patroclux

Summary: Charles had spared his life. That was not something he could easily repay.

They wrote letters to each other for two years, until Charles was pulled out of the war from a sudden illness and Erik remained to fight for a cause he didn't believe in. One that ultimately had no effect; one that stole away four years of his life.

Traumatized and persecuted, Erik applied for a post at Janus, a lighthouse in the middle of the Irish Sea. He thought being alone would do him good.

Despite the letters and despite the love, Erik didn't expect Charles to find him.

Hier steh ich an den Marken meiner Tage – MonstrousRegiment

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr is a spy in the SS, and his British liaison is strategist Charles Xavier. Their relationship from the moment they meet to a year after the end of the war.

Theme and Variations: War – ninemoons42

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr is a musical prodigy and a man destined for great things and great stages. But his life is shattered by a terrible accident that leaves him blind and trying to find his way back to his life, his music, and his place in the world.

Then he meets Charles Xavier, an agent of Section 8 of the Military Intelligence Directorate of Providence, and he finds himself listening in to clandestine radio transmissions and clicking Morse code, and these sounds are part and parcel of a war that can only take place in the shadows and the hidden places of history.

Strib nicht von Mir – ravenoftheninerealms

Summary: A squad of Allied Forces, led by Charles Xavier, liberates the Nazi concentration camp where Erik was being held prisoner.

Cold foxholes, warm hearts – oddegg

Summary: Basically, this is Band of Mutants. A little slice of life in Bastogne.

Photographs and Memories – tirsynni

Summary: When war-battered Erik Lehnsherr met Charles Xavier, the man kneeling in the dirt and whispering to a lost refugee child, Erik feared his days of running from his deviance was done.

Marching Home – Quietbang

Summary: For a prompt on the meme asking for fic dealing with the fact that, in comics canon, Charles served in the Korean war.

War meant something different to this generation, Charles knew.

Crash on the Levy (Down in the Flood) – Quietbang

Summary: “This is much bigger than you think. You're in the middle of a war, and you don't even realize, do you?”

He pauses, and answers his own question.“No, of course you don't. How silly of me."

The Knight and the Dagger – Dow

Summary: A Lieutenant in the Soviet Army, Erik Lensherr had no other goals than to find the man that killed his parents. But when a discovery yields a little boy with wings like an angel, Erik is shocked to realize that he isn’t alone. There are other people like him, both dangerous and alluring.

Lifelong Service – Pookaseraph

Summary: Erik thinks he should be the one to teach their recruits hand-to-hand combat; Charles makes a persuasive argument to the contrary.

Footsteps of uprooted lovers – ninemoons42

Summary: Against a turbulent backdrop of artistic, social, and political upheaval, the playwright Charles Xavier and the photographer Erik Lehnsherr find themselves meeting under less-than-polite circumstances, but part rather more amicably than they'd met.

When they find each other again in a Barcelona that is falling inexorably toward war, they find themselves taking up arms, each in his own way, and together they join a struggle for freedom, for love, and for their very lives.

Dear Soldier – Lindstrom, ToriTC198

Summary: "Dear Soldier,

I pray that this package finds you well. The organization gave us a list of odds and ends that you might need, but I thought that a person so far from home might appreciate something more than soap and tube socks."

When Charles' school decides to send care packages to the soldiers fighting in Vietnam, he chooses to also include a letter and a few personal touches. When Staff Sergeant Erik is the recipient of that particular care package it will spur a relationship that will change them both.

Fortunate Son – blueink13

Summary: he days leading up to and during Alex's deployment in Vietnam. Everyone handles it in their own way. Some handle better than others.

You’re Here – Deshonana

Summary: Everyone decides its a good idea not to tell Erik when his boyfriend comes home from the military.

Welcome Home –  loveydoveyecstasy

Summary: It's been two years since Charles was deployed to Afghanistan, and Erik can't wait to pick him up at the airport.

When Secrets have Secrets – ximeria

Summary: The arguments that take place in General Xavier's office when General Lehnsherr has a bad day are legendary. Quite frankly, no one really knows what's going on and if the two men have it their way, no one ever will.

Quiet Company – Sophia_Bee

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr is always on the move. He's spent the last many years going from war torn country to war torn country telling the stories of the people there through photographs. Then one of his pictures is selected as a winner for the Pulitzer Prize and Erik finds himself stuck in London for longer than he wants. He ends up with an assignment to photograph Charles Xavier, a wealthy philanthropist who is intrigued to find himself working with a Pulitzer-winning war photographer. Erik is far less intrigued by someone he considers privileged and out of touch. Both of their lives are about to change in ways they couldn't imagine.

The City is Ours – RedStockings

Summary: Erik felt his heart racing with excitement, lightened, and for once felt joyful. Charles had looked at him, really looked at him, and there had been something there, a knowing of a kind. As the soldiers laughed amongst each other, and joked each other about who would succeed in marrying the boy, Erik made himself a silent vow. Charles was going to be his, and nothing would keep him from having him. He’d marry him, and he’d save him, and Charles would love him for it.

Not even the war could keep them apart... right?

Sign of the Times – dsrobertson

Summary: Casablanca-ish AU.

Charles Xavier meets Erik Lehnsherr in Paris, 1937. They spend the next two years with one another, stupid in-love, until war comes heavy in September 1939. Erik leaves for Poland and the Resistance movement there, promising to return. Charles is left in Paris, where Nazi jackboots march in, Summer of 1940. He becomes a member of the underground French Resistance, publishing illegal newsletters, leaflets, until news comes through in February 1942: Erik is dead. Charles throws himself into more dangerous work, meeting with Communists, helping derail a German train, and he does too much, goes too far. His friends find him safe passage out of France, out across the Mediterranean, to Morocco, Casablanca. It is here he finds Erik, alive.

The Waste Land – nekosmuse

Summary: The White Queen and her Shadow King sit on their throne, safe behind the psionic shields of the Walled City. The armies of Genosha batter uselessly at the gates, a war locked in stalemate. Magneto, camped in the frozen mud, receives word the Citadel intends to send a telepath to the front lines. The same telepath he met two years ago, who sat across a carved wooden chess set and offered Magneto the first friendly smile in a lifetime. The same telepath who still haunts his dreams.

Winter Comes With a Knife – RedStockings

Summary: It apparently came to no one’s surprise that the war-mage Erik Lehnsherr took up residence in the Dark Keep. I knew he was going to choose my sister, Raven, to be his apprentice so why wouldn’t he let me go? What did he want from me?

My name is Charles Xavier, I can read minds and use magic. I’ve met Kings and Queens, mages and magic users. I’ve travelled through lay-lines and jumped through the Dark Void… but none of that really matters.

I am leading an army into war, I am scared and I never wanted this. I’ve come to realise that what I want, rode into my life when I was still a child. Now he’s out there, ready to charge into battle. Ready to die for me.

Polaris – LastAmericanMermaid

Summary: Charles Xavier is 19 years old, doe-eyed and soft; Erik Lehnsherr is 24 years old, steely-hard and bitter. One is a soldier, the other a refugee. Both are mutants. There will be pain, oh yes.

(An AU in which Charles is a wounded British soldier, Erik is the German hiding in France who nurses him back to health, and the contents of this fic are best read to the soundtrack of Atonement.)

Note: Unfinished

MEDIC! – paladin_danse

Summary: A British airborne medic finds himself alone and afraid behind enemy lines. When he decides to save the life of an S.S. German officer he finds wounded in the snow, he has no idea the choice he has made will alter the course of the war—and their lives—forever.

Note: Sadly unfinished

Suicide is Painlesss – weethreequarter 

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr did not become a doctor to pick bullets out of children. Unfortunately the US Army had other ideas.

Stuck in the middle of the Korean War, Erik and his fellow civilian surgeons have to battle not only the war, but also weather, mud, and boredom. And that's without mentioning Major Sebastian Shaw who thinks war is the best thing that's ever happened to him and never should've been allowed to pick up a scalpel, or Colonel William Stryker who may or may not work for the CIA and probably doesn't even know himself.

Throw in new arrival Captain Charles Xavier, and Erik is in for a very interesting war.

Note: Unfinished

A Light That Never Goes Out – R_Cookie

Summary: It was meant to be the war to end all wars; these two men were never supposed to meet. One a German Jew, the other a British surgeon. The odds that their paths should cross were next to none - but War defies the expected. It always has, and always will.

From the beaches of Dunkirk to the treacherous slopes of Monte Cassino - this is their story.

WWII AU.

Note: Unfinished

[greatworldwar2]

• U.S Army Nurse Corps

The United States Army Nurse Corps (AN or ANC) was formally established by the U.S. Congress in 1901. 96% of the 670,000 wounded soldiers and sailors who made it to a field hospital staffed by nurses and doctors survived their injuries. By the end of the war, the Army and Army Air Forces (AAF) had 54,000 nurses and the Navy 11,000—all women.

Nurses served in Washington's Army during the Revolutionary War. Although the women who tended the sick and wounded during the Revolutionary War were not nurses as known in the modern sense, they blazed the trail for later generations when, in 1873, civilian hospitals in America began operating recognized schools of nursing. Professionalization was a dominant theme during the Progressive Era, because it valued expertise and hierarchy over ad-hoc volunteering in the name of civic duty. The Army Nurse Corps became a permanent corps of the Medical Department under the Army Reorganization Act (31 Stat. 753) on February 2nd, 1901. Nurses were appointed in the Regular Army for a three-year period, although nurses were not actually commissioned as officers in the Regular Army until forty-six years later-on in April 1947. The number of nurses on active duty hovered around 100 in the years after the creation of the corps, with the two largest groups serving at the general hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco and at the First Reserve hospital in Manila. In World War I (American participation from 1917–18) the military recruited 20,000 registered nurses (all women) for military and navy duty in 58 military hospitals; they helped staff 47 ambulance companies that operated on the Western Front. More than 10,000 served overseas, while 5,400 nurses enrolled in the Army's new School of Nursing.

Demobilization reduced the two corps to skeleton units designed to be expanded should a new war take place. Eligibility at this time included being female, white, unmarried, volunteer, and a graduate from a civilian nursing school. In 1920, Army Nurse Corps personnel received officer-equivalent ranks and wore Army rank insignia on their uniforms. However, they did not receive equivalent pay and were not considered part of the US Army. At the start of the war in December 1941, there were fewer than 1,000 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps and 700 in the Navy Nurse Corps. All were women. Due to the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, the United States entered the Pacific part of World War II. Along with this military effort was the work of the Flying Tigers in Kunming, China, under Claire Chennault. Nurses were thus needed in China to serve the U.S. Army. These nurses were recruited among the Chinese nurses residing in China, particularly the English-speaking nurses that fled Hong Kong (a British colony) to free China due to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong on December 8th, 1941.

Only a few African American nurses were admitted to the Army Nurse Corps. Mabel Keaton Staupers, who worked for the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses with help from Eleanor Roosevelt, pressured the Army to admit African American nurses in 1941. The first black nurse admitted to the program was Della H. Raney who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in April of 1941. The limit on black nurses was 48 in 1941 and they were mostly segregated from white nurses and soldiers. In 1943, the Army set a limit on black nurses to 160. That same year, the first African American medical unit, the 25th Station Hospital Unit, was deployed overseas to Liberia. Later, nurses were deployed to Burma, where they treated black soldiers. African American nurses also served in China, Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, England and in the US where they treated prisoners of war. Some 217 black nurses served in all-black Army medical units.

Throughout 1941 the United States had responded to the increasing tensions in the Far East by deploying more troops in the Philippines. The number of Army nurses stationed on the islands grew proportionately to more than one hundred. Most nurses worked at Sternberg General Hospital in Manila and at Fort McKinley, 7 miles outside the city. However, a few nurses were at Fort Stotsenberg, 75 miles north of Manila, and two worked at Camp John Hay, located 200 miles to the north in the mountains. Several nurses worked on the island of Corregidor. Six months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there were 12,000 nurses on duty in the Army Nurse Corps. Few of them had previous military experience, and the majority reported for duty ignorant of Army methods and protocol. Only in July 1943 did Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, Commanding General, Army Service Forces, authorize a formal four-week training course for all newly commissioned Army nurses. This program stressed Army organization; military customs and courtesies; field sanitation; defense against air, chemical, and mechanized attack; personnel administration; military requisitions and correspondence, and property responsibility. From July 1943 through September 1945 approximately 27,330 newly inducted nurses graduated from fifteen Army training centers. More than 2,000 nurses trained in a six-month course designed to teach them how to administer inhalation anesthesia, blood and blood derivatives, and oxygen therapy as well as how to recognize, prevent, and treat shock. In December 1943 the U.S. War Department decided that there were enough nurses in the Army Nurse Corps to meet both existing and anticipated future demands on the Army. Consequently, the Army instructed the American Red Cross, which throughout the war had been responsible for the recruitment of nurses for the Army Nurse Corps, to stop recruiting. The Red Cross sent telegrams to local volunteer committees in every state advising them to discontinue their sustained drive to enlist nurses.

In November 1942 the United States invaded North Africa to link with British forces in the North Africa campaign. The Army nurses who participated in the North African invasion at first had little conception of the realities of battle and were unfamiliar with military procedures. One nurse at the Arzew hospital became so incensed at snipers firing into the windows of the hospital and endangering the patients that she had to be forcibly restrained from going outside to "give them a piece of her mind." Nurses serving at the front in North Africa became expert at meeting the challenges of combat while caring for incoming patients. In February 1943 when news reached the 77th Evacuation Hospital bivouacked near Tebessa that the German Army had broken through the Kasserine Pass, staff members packed up and moved their 150 patients sixty miles to a safer bivouac. Within twelve hours a new hospital was fully operational and received another 500 casualties. During the Allied counterattack from mid-April through May 1943, which captured northern Tunisia, the 77th treated 4,577 soldiers within a 45-day period. The nurses' performance during the North African invasion taught the Army several lessons that it applied to the invasions of Sicily and southern Italy. Commanding officers noticed that nurses acclimated quickly to difficult and dangerous conditions with a minimum of complaints.

Their efficiency and professional accomplishments made them essential members of the field armies. The presence of nurses at the front improved the morale of all fighting men because soldiers realized that they would receive skilled care in the event they were wounded. Hospitalized men recovered sooner when nurses cared for them. Troops in the field figured that "if the nurses can take it, then we can." U.S. and British troops invaded Sicily on July 9th, 1943, and nurses of the 10th Field Hospital and the 11th Evacuation Hospital arrived on the island three days later. There they were greeted by German Stuka dive bombers which forced them into slit trenches and foxholes during the first few days. Other nurses scheduled to support the invading U.S. Seventh Army had to wait nine days for transport, which was in short supply during the first week of the invasion. Continuous periods of bad weather caused one of the most famous incidents in Nurse Corps history. On November 8th, 1943, a C-54 ferrying thirteen flight nurses and thirteen medical technicians (corpsmen) of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron from Sicily to Bari on the east coast of Italy ran into severe weather. The plane lost radio contact, the compass failed, and the pilot became disoriented in the storm. Icing finally forced the plane down in the Albanian mountains far behind German lines. Partisan guerrillas found the Americans and took them to a nearby farmhouse. That night the flight crew set fire to the plane to conceal traces of their presence in the area. In bitterly cold weather and blinding snowstorms, the small band made a hazardous, two-month journey covering 800 miles. The escapees suffered from frostbite, dysentery, jaundice, and pneumonia, but all the nurses except three who were separated from the main body of the group arrived safely. Throughout February and March, medical installations on the beachhead continued to receive direct hits. On March 29th, 1944 the 56th Evacuation Hospital was shelled, leaving 3 officers, 1 nurse, 14 enlisted men, and 19 patients wounded and 4 patients killed. Whenever the air raid sirens at Anzio sounded, those patients who could put on their steel helmets and crawled under their cots to avoid flying shrapnel. Nurses and corpsmen lifted others to the ground. Patients whose condition rendered them immovable became very nervous, and nurses ignored the danger to stay with them. A later observer explained that the medical detachment at Anzio was "part of a front that had no back. medical installations earned it the nickname "Hell's Half Acre." Many soldiers believed that they were safer in their frontline foxholes than they would be in the hospitals.

By June 1945 the number of Army nurses in the European theater of the war reached a peak of 17,345. The first nurses to arrive in Normandy were members of the 42d and 45th Field Hospitals and the 91st and 128th Evacuation Hospitals. They landed on the beachhead four days after the initial invasion in June 1944. The nurses' experiences in the European theater varied widely, depending upon their assignments. The experiences of those assigned to the 12th Evacuation Hospital reflected that diversity. Unit members sailed for England in January 1943. After several moves they arrived on the east coast of England in May 1944. There they participated in the buildup for the Allied invasion of the Continent by establishing a tent hospital and preparing for the expected influx of casualties. In early June they watched hundreds of Allied planes fly overhead to prepare the way for the invasion. The 12th Evacuation Hospital deployed to France in July, arriving in Normandy in August. By that time most of the heavy casualties incurred during the first weeks of the invasion had already been evacuated to England. Throughout August Allied forces pushed the German Briny eastward through France toward the Siegfried Line. The front moved rapidly; high numbers of casualties occurred only in pockets of resistance and were handled by other evacuation hospitals. In mid-September the Allies met the German defenses at the Siegfried Line, and casualties mounted. The 12th established operations at Bonneval, where it admitted 1,260 patients in less than one month. The nurses of the 12th moved eleven times in two years. After each relocation they had to prepare a sanitary, comfortable hospital capable of handling large numbers of critically wounded or sick patients. Their experience alternated between periods of exhausting activity and intense boredom. They had to be flexible, innovative, quick-thinking, patient, adaptable, and highly skilled. Nurses frequently demonstrated their ability to remain calm in unpredictable and dangerous situations. For example, flight nurse Reba Z. Whittle's C-47 was caught by flak and crashed behind enemy lines in September 1944. Every member of the crew, including Whittle, was wounded. The Germans provided their prisoners with medical care and upon their recovery incarcerated them in Stalag IXC. Whittle's captors allowed her to nurse other POWs throughout her captivity. Whittle was held as a prisoner of war for five months until her release in January 1945.

After American and British forces repulsed this last German offensive, medical units accompanied the Allied forces into Germany. In newly conquered, hostile territory the nurses experienced new pressures. Third Army nurses noticed that the deeper the Americans went into Germany, the more openly hostile German civilians became. Near Darmstadt, the hospital had to be guarded at all times. According to one nurse, German civilians looked at the nurses "with actual hatred in their eyes—and children throw stones at ambulances and spit at jeeps." The final push into central Germany cost the western Allies heavy casualties and required medical units to work under great pressure. The 44th Evacuation Hospital admitted 1,348 patients from the 3d Armored Division during one 56-hour period in mid-April. Casualties also came in from the 9th Infantry, engaged in clearing out the area north of the Harz Mountains. This expect and many like it were how nurses in the European theater experienced the final days of WW2 in Europe. With over 8 million soldiers and airmen, the needs were more than double those of World War I. Hundreds of new military hospitals were constructed for the expected flow of casualties. Fearing a massive wave of combat casualties once Japan was invaded in late 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Congress early in 1945 for permission to draft nurses. However, with the rapid collapse of Germany early in 1945, and the limitation of the war in the Pacific to a few islands, the draft was not needed and was never enacted.

There is no single comprehensive history of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, nor is there a volume in the official United States Army in World War II series that deals with this corps. The best approach to learning more about Army nurses during World War II is to read the relatively few individual memoirs which have been published over the years. The following are among the best. In From Nightingale to Eagle: An Army Nurses History (1973), GI Nightingale: The Story of an American Army Nurse (1945). In Jungle Angel: Bataan Remembered (1988) and many other stories which detail the experience of these brave women near the frontline fighting to keep men alive. Members of the Army Nurse Corps served in Theaters all over the world. They often had to live and work under trying conditions, treating others and suffering themselves from tropical illnesses and diseases, adapting to different climatic conditions. Moreover, Nurses had to cope with inadequate supplies and lack of adapted Theater clothing. Some came under fire, others were taken prisoner, and many had narrow escapes. Deaths were unavoidable, due to hazardous duty. In total, over 59,000 Nurses served in the Army Nurse Corps during World War 2.

[route22ny]

What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America

Born in 1939 during what would be the last years of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, my father, Choung Tai Chee, also called Charles or Chuck or Charlie, came to the United States in 1960. He was flashy, cocky, unafraid, it seemed, of anything. Wherever we were in the world, he seemed at home, right up until near the end of his life, when he was hospitalized after a car accident that left him in a coma. Only in that hospital bed, his head shaved for surgery, did he look out of place to me.

A tae kwon do champion by the age of 18 in Korea, he had begun studying martial arts at age 8, eventually teaching them as a way to put himself through graduate school, first in engineering and then oceanography, in Texas, California, and Rhode Island. He loved the teaching. The rising popularity of martial arts in the 1960s in Hollywood meant he made celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra Jr., Paul Lynde, Sal Mineo, and Peter Fonda, who my father said had fixed him up on a date with his sister, Jane, in the days before Barbarella. A favorite photo from his time in Texas shows him flying through the air, a human horseshoe, each of his bare feet breaking a board held shoulder high on each side by his students.

When I complained about my wet boots during the winters growing up in Maine, he told me stories about running barefoot in the snow in Korea to harden his feet for tae kwon do. His answer to many of my childhood complaints was usually that I had to be tougher, stronger, prepared for any attack or disaster. The lesson his generation took from those they lost to the Korean War was that death was always close, and I know now that he was doing all he could to teach me to protect myself. When I cried at the beach at the water’s edge, afraid of the waves, he threw me in. “No son of mine is going to be afraid of the ocean,” he said. When I first started swimming lessons, he told me I had to be a strong swimmer, in case the boat I was on went down, so I could swim to shore. When he taught me to body-surf, he taught me about how to know the approach of an undertow, and how to survive a riptide. When I lacked a competitive streak, he took to racing me at something I loved—swimming underwater while holding my breath. I was an asthmatic child, but soon, intent on beating him, I could swim 50 yards this way at a time.

For all of that, he was an exceedingly gentle father. He took me snorkeling on his back, when I was five, telling me we were playing at being dolphins. There he taught me the names of the fish along the reef where we lived in Guam. He would praise the highlights in my hair, and laugh, calling me “Apollo.” And as for any pressure regarding my future career, he offered something very rare for a Korean man of his generation. “Be whatever you want to be,” he told me. “Just be the best at it that you can possibly be.”

Only when I was older did I understand the warning about being strong enough to swim to shore in another context, when I learned the boat he and his family had fled in from what was about to become North Korea nearly sank in a storm. In Seoul as a child, he scavenged food for his family with his older brother, coming home with bags of rice found on overturned military supply trucks, while his father went to the farms, collecting gleanings. His attempts to teach me to strip a chicken clean of its meat make a different sense now. I had thought of him as an immigrant without thinking about how the Korean War made him one of the dispossessed, almost a refugee, all before he left Korea.

When I began getting into fights as a child in the U.S., he put me into classes in karate and tae kwon do for these same reasons. He loved me and he wanted me to be strong. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to take on a whole country.

We moved to Maine in 1973, when I was six years old. My father had taken us back to Korea after I was born, to work for his father, and then moved us around the Pacific—from Seoul to the islands of Truk, Kawaii, and Guam, in his and my mother’s attempts to set up a fisheries company. Maine was his next experiment, and not coincidentally, my mother’s home state. On my first day of the first grade, in the cafeteria, after a morning spent in what seemed like reasonably friendly classes, my troubles began when I went up to take an empty seat at a table and the blond haired, blue-eyed white boy seated there looked up with some alarm and asked me, “Are you a chink?”

“What’s a chink?” I asked, though I knew it wasn’t a compliment. I had never heard this word before.

“A Chinese person. You look like a chink. Is that why your face is so flat?”

This was also the first day I can remember being insulted about my appearance.

“I am not Chinese,” I said that day, naively. In a few years I would learn I was in fact part Chinese, 41 generations back, but at that moment, I tried to explain to him about how I was half Korean, a nationality and situation he had never heard of before. Half of what? And so this was also the first day I had to explain myself to someone who didn’t care, who had already decided against me.

He was a white boy from America, and he was repeating insults that seem to me to have come from a secret book passed out to white children everywhere in this country, telling them to call someone Asian “Chink,” to walk up to them, muttering “Ching-chong, ching-chong.” To sing a song, “My mother’s Chinese, my father’s Japanese, I’m all mixed up,” pulling their eyes first down and then up and then alternating up and down.

I was struck, watching Minari a few months ago, when the film’s Korean immigrant protagonist, David, is asked by a white boy in Arkansas in the 1980s why his face is so flat. “It’s not,” David says, forcefully—so many of us have this memory of someone saying this to us and responding that way. Why did a boy in Arkansas and a boy in Maine, in their small towns thousands of miles apart, before the internet, each know to make this insult?

When I got home from that first day at school, I asked my mother what the word “Chink” meant, and she flinched and covered her mouth in concern.

“Who said that to you?” she asked, and I told her. I don’t remember the conversation that followed, just the swift look of concern on her face. The sense that something had found us.

I was the only Asian-American student at my school in 1973, and the first many of my classmates had ever met. When my brother joined me at school three years later, he was the second. When my sister arrived, four years after him, she was the third. My mother is white, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed American, born in Maine to a settler family. I have six ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, but none of them had to fight this. I don’t know how to separate the teasing, harassment, and bullying that marked my 12 years of life there from that first racist welcome. It makes me question whether I really had a “temper” as a child, as I was told, or whether I was merely isolated by racism among racists, afraid and angry?

My father dealt with racism throughout most of his life by acting as if it had never happened—as if admitting it made it more powerful. He knew bullies loved to see their victims react and would tell me to not let what they said upset me. “Why do you care what they think of you?” he would say, and laugh as he clapped me on the shoulder. “They’re all going to work for you someday.”

“Don’t get even, get ahead,” was another of his slogans for me at these times. As if America was a race we were going to win.

Two decades after his death, writing in my diary while on a subway in New York City, I began counting off all of my activities as a child—choir, concert band, swimming, karate and tae kwon do, clarinet, indoor track, downhill and cross country skiing—and I asked myself if my parents were trying to raise Batman. Then I looked down to the insignia on my Batman t-shirt, and I laughed.

These lessons my father gave me—to be the best you can be, to fight off your enemies and defeat them, to swim to safety if the boat sinks, and in general toughen yourself against everything that would harm you—these I had absorbed alongside certain unspoken lessons, taken from observing his life as a Korean immigrant. To have two names, one American, known to the public, and one Korean, known only to a few intimates; to get rid of your accent; and to dress well as a way to keep yourself above suspicion. Did I need to train like a superhero just to be a person in America? Maybe.

But if I thought of superheroes, it was because my father was like one to me, training me to be like him.

One legend I heard about my father when I was growing up is the story of a night he was being held up at gunpoint, while he was unpacking his car. Whoever it was asked him to shut the trunk and turn around and raise his hands in the air. He agreed to, slamming the car trunk down so forcefully, he sank his fingertips into the metal.

By the time he turned around, the would-be stick-up artist was gone.

He would often ask me and my brother to punch him, as hard as we could, in his stomach. He was proud of his abdominal strength—it was like punching a wall. We would shake our hands, howling, and he would laugh and rub our heads. One time he even used it as a gag to stop a bully.

A boy on my street had developed the habit of changing the rules during our games if his team started losing. We had fights over it that could be heard up and down the street, and one day I chased him with a Wiffle bat, him laughing as I ran. My father stepped in the next time he tried to change the rules during a game and prevented it, telling him all games in his yard had to have the same rules at the beginning as the end—you couldn’t change them when you were losing. When the boy got mad, he said, “I bet you want to hit me, you should hit me. You’ll feel better. Hit me right here, in the stomach, as hard as you can.”

The boy hauled off and punched my dad in the stomach. I knew what was coming. The boy went home crying, shaking his hand at the pain. His mom came over and they had a talk. The rule-changing stopped.

I tried teasing my classmates back after being told to by my father. Stand-up as self-defense requires practice, though: During a “Where are you from?” exercise in the second grade, I told my classmates and teacher I had “Made in Korea” stamped on my ass, which elicited shocked laughter and a punishment from my teacher. I remember the glee when I called a classmate an ignoramus, and he didn’t know what it meant—and got angrier and angrier when I wouldn’t tell him, demanding that I explain the insult. When told to go back to where I came from, I said, “You first.”

Increasingly, I just hid, in the library, in books. When given detention, I exulted in the chance to be alone and read. I was an advanced student compared to my classmates, due in part to my mother being a schoolteacher, and I learned to make my intelligence a weapon.

The day several boys held me down on my street and ran their bicycles over my legs, to see if I could take it, as if maybe I wasn’t human, that felt like some new horrible level. I don’t remember how that ended or if I ever told anyone, just the feeling of the bicycle tires rolling over the skin of my legs. The day I bragged about my father being a martial artist to my classmates, they locked me in the bathroom and told me to fight my way out with kung fu, calling me “Hong Kong Phooey,” after the cartoon character, as they held the door shut. This was the fourth grade. After I got out of that bathroom and went home, I told my father about it, and he told me it was time to take tae kwon do. I had to learn to defend myself.

I would never be like him, never break boards like him, but for a while, I tried. I still cherish the day he gave me my first gi and showed me how to tie it. I learned I had a natural flexibility, which meant I could easily kick high, and I took pride in my roundhouse and reverse roundhouse kicks. But after a few years, my father took issue with a story he’d heard about my teacher’s arrogance toward his opponents, and he pulled me out of the classes. “It is very dangerous to teach in that spirit,” he told me. And he said something I would never forget. “The best fighter in tae kwon do never fights,” he said. “He always finds another way.”

I have thought about this for a long time. For the ordinary practitioner, tae kwon do and karate prepare you to go about your life, aware of what to do in case of assault. They offer no guarantee, just chances for preparedness in the face of the violence of others as well as the violence within yourself. At the time I felt my father was describing the responsibility that comes with knowing how to hurt someone, but I came to understand it as a principled if conditional non-violence, which, in this year of quarantine and rising racist violence, is one of the clearest legacies he left to me.

Like many of us, I have been trying to write about these most recent attacks on Asian-Americans, some of them in my old neighborhood in New York, and I keep starting and stopping. How do we protect ourselves and those we love? Can writing do that? I know I learned to use my intelligence as a weapon to keep myself safe from racists, starting as a child, and suddenly it doesn’t feel like enough. The violence is like a puzzle with many moving parts, but the stakes are life and death. “You’re really going to homework your way through this one?” I keep asking myself. The people attacking Asians and Asian Americans now are like the boy I met on my first day in the first grade. They don’t care whether or not we are actually Chinese—the primary experience Asian Americans have in common is mis-identification. The person who gets a patriotic ego boost off of calling me a “chink” isn’t going to check if they’re right about me, and I don’t imagine they’ll stop their fist or their gun if I say, “You’re just doing this because of America’s history of war in Asia,” even though we both know this is true. And so I have been thinking of my father and what he taught me.

The most overt way my father fought racism in front of me involved no fighting at all. He founded a group called the Korean American Friendship Association of Maine, which helped new Korean immigrants move to Maine and find work, community, and housing, along with offering lessons on how to open bank accounts, pay taxes, file immigration paperwork, and get drivers’ licenses. For both of my parents, community organizing, activism, and mutual aid like this were commitments they shared and enjoyed and passed along to us, their children, and this led to much of my own work as an activist, teacher, and writer. I am not my father, but I am much as he made me.

There’s a difference between fighting racists and fighting racism. Where my father stayed silent, I have learned I have to speak out, which has felt, even while writing this, a little like betraying him. And as a biracial gay Korean American man, I don’t experience the same identifications or misidentifications he did. I am mistaken for white, or at least “not Asian,” as often as I’m mistaken for Chinese, and have felt like a secret agent as people speak in front of me about Asians in ways they would not otherwise. I learned most of my adult coping strategies for street violence from queer activist organizations after college.

Even as I write, “I wonder if he ever felt fear living in America,” it feels like a betrayal, especially as he isn’t around for me to ask him. I think again about how my father always made a point of dressing well, for example, but it always felt like more than that. Men wearing suits as a kind of armor, that isn’t so strange. He had his suits made at J. Press, wore handmade English leather shoes—shoes that fit me. I sometimes wear them for special occasions. Among my favorite objects of his is a monogrammed J. Press canvas briefcase, the name “CHEE” in embossed leather between the straps. After his father gave him an Omega Constellation watch when I was born, he eventually acquired others. For a time I thought he did this aspirationally, but most of his family in Korea is like this: Well-dressed, with a preference for tailoring and handmade clothes. All of my memories of my uncles coming from the airport to visit us involve them arriving in their blazers.

The first time I followed my father’s advice to wear a sports jacket when flying, I received a spontaneous upgrade. I didn’t have frequent flyer miles and the person checking me in was not flirting with me either. There was nothing but the moment of grace, and the feeling that my father, from beyond the grave, was making a point as I sat down in my new, larger, more spacious seat. Because I had never tried out this advice while he was alive.

Like much of my father’s advice, it came from his keen awareness of social contexts, and it worked. His wardrobe came from the pleasure of a dare more than a disguise. You don’t acquire a black and gold silk brocade smoking jacket in suburban Maine because you want to fit in with your white neighbors. Sometimes his clothes were a charm offensive, sometimes just a sass. The jacket advice may well have been an anticipation of racist treatment, of a piece with perfecting his English so he had no accent, and raising us to speak only English. My mother spoke more Korean to us as children than he did—a remnant of her time living in Seoul.

Now that I am old enough to choose to learn Korean, I still feel like a child disobeying him, just as I do when I dress too casually, or acknowledge that I’ve experienced racism. I know I am just making different choices, as you do when you are grown, but also, I am stepping out from behind his program to protect myself. I feel the fears he never spoke about, and instead simply addressed with what now look like tactics. At these moments I miss him as much as I ever do, but especially for how I would tell him, this may have protected you. It won’t protect me.

In my kitchen the other day, as I was making coffee, I fell into the ready stance, with my right foot back, left foot forward, and snapped my right leg up and out in a front snap kick. This is the basic first kick you learn in tae kwon do. And you do it again, and again, and again, until it is muscle memory. You move across the room this way and then turn to begin again.

I wasn’t sure if my form was exactly right, but it felt good. Memories came back of the sweaty smell of the practice room, the other students, the mirrors on the walls, the fluorescent lights. All those years ago, I had thought my father had put me in those classes in order to become him, but as I sent my practice kicks through the air, I remembered how even learning them made me feel safer, protected at least by the knowledge that he loved me. I could not have said this at the time, but after those attacks, I had feared I wasn’t strong enough to be his son.

I still fear that. I suppose it drives me, even now. It is dehumanizing to insist on your humanity, even and perhaps especially now, and so I am not doing that here. Each time I’ve tried to write even this, a rage takes over, and then the only thing I want to do with my hands doesn’t involve writing, and I stop. But I know from learning to fight that hitting someone else means using yourself to do it. My father’s advice, about fighting being the last resort, has given me another lesson: You turn yourself into the weapon when you strike someone else—in the end, another way to erase yourself—and so you do that last. In the meantime, you fight that first fight with yourself, for yourself.

You may never be able to protect what you love, but at least you can try. At least you will be ready.

Alexander Chee is most recently the author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. A novelist and essayist, he teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

[montmartre-parapluie]

Will you please explain American Girl Dolls to my poor European self? Thank you!

Hi @orlissa!

I’m probably not the best person to explain, being a UK gal and very, VERY new to the fandom- but what the heck, I’ll try! 

picture-heavy below the cut! 

I’ll borrow from my good friend Wikipedia for the serious facts:

“ The Historical Characters line of 18-inch dolls, which were derived from the 18-inch dolls made by Götz in West Germany (during the late 1980s to the 1990s, were initially the main focus of Pleasant Company, founded by Pleasant Rowland in 1986. This product line aims to teach aspects of American history through a six-book series from the perspective of a girl living in that time period. Pleasant Rowland came up with the idea after she returned from a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, where she noticed there was a significant void in the toy market for younger aged dolls and saw an opportunity to provide an alternative to baby and adult dolls.

Although the books are written for girls who are at least eight years old, they endeavour to cover significant topics such as child labour, child abuse, poverty, racism, slavery, animal abuse and war in manners appropriate for the understanding and sensibilities of their young audience.”

There were initially 5 original dolls. You could choose from Molly, a girl from World War 2,  Addy Walker, a fugitive seeking freedom during the American Civil War, Kirsten, a little Swedish girl from 1854 who lives on the prairie, Felicity, who deals with outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, and Samantha, who’s from 1904.

it sounds pretty dry and educational In the Wikipedia , but oh my giddy aunt, the QUALITY of the stuff they put out! 

for instance, here’s Kirsten - and this is just a FRACTION of her collection. She had hand-painted wooden furniture, beautifully made. She had trunks. She had 19th century accurate little footwarmers, reproduced ACTUAL children’s books FROM the 1850s, Her Saint Lucia’s Day outfit! Even down to warm flannel underwear for those cold nights out West in the New World!

And here’s a close-up of the LITTLE school set. A REAL Victorian school slate, chalk that actually works, a little schoolbag - authentic miniature exercise books from the 1850s - even tiny merit awards printed on card! And all authentic!

This isn’t the only doll they do this for, either? Addy?

real little crinoline, working wooden Lazy Susan table, Victorian bonnets, tiny perfect little sewing accessories.

Samantha also gets accessories that look like they’re straight from an Edwardian Toyshop...

(the flower pressing kit! the tiny skates! The painting box!!)

Molly’s stuff wasn’t/isn’t as interesting to me, because I’m not really into the  20th century, but even her accessories are cute! (the little 1940s radio!)

I tell you, I would have SOLD my soul for any of this. ANY of it. But especially Felicity, because the 18th century has always been my favourite time period , and her stuff...just  WOW. I feel the need to give you all her stuff, because... it was amazing.

THE TEA SET. THE PATTENS. THE MINIATURE HORNBOOK. THE CLOTHES PRESS. 

And this stuff is all really faithfully produced, and just... really well made and researched. As a history nerd, I get twitchy fingers just looking at all this!

And they just.. KEPT on producing this awesomeness. All through the 1990s and 2000s. They extended the range to include  Kaya'aton'my, a Native American girl from 1764, Josefina, a Spanish Colonial girl from 1824, there was a Regency girl, Caroline from 1812. - and Marie Grace and Cecile, a lovely set of  French friend dolls from New Orleans in the 1850s - and there were so many more!  

I am incredibly bitter & twisted that Europe & the UK didn’t get a look in on buying these. (although I think West Germany had them in the early 1990s?) I suppose as it’s American history, they didn’t think it would sell well abroad, but - gah, I’d have bought it all! And they could have branched out into European history, which is just such a tempting thought.... 

(You can probably see why I post about A Girl for All Time - they’re very much a new UK take on American Girl)

My mother actually collected American Girl stuff for a while when the US postage was cheap enough for it to be feasible , but I wasn’t around then much and only took a vague interest. Lock-down’s been making me re-evaluate my opinion! Especially once I learnt the company made do-it-yourself SEWING PATTERNS as well...

(this is definitely on my to-do list, by the way. )

Recently the company has archived most of these lovely things in favour of more modern dolls, which I think is a REAL shame. Educational, well-made and fun is a hard mix to achieve in one go, but American Girl did it. Definitely worth a Google search if you’re interested in seeing more!

[thuviel]

1, 3, 5, and 6 for the video games ask?

Hey, remember this ask? So sorry for replying so late, I started answering this when I got it but then my pc crashed and I lost all I'd written so it took some extra energy to retype it all ^^' (and my health issues didn't help either lol). Feel free to read if you're still interested!

1: Do you try to stay away from walkthroughs?

Yeah, I only use walktroughs when I've basically finished the game but I wanna 100% it so I look up where the last quests trigger that I might have missed. Also if I get reeeeally stuck and can't advance for several days and it's no longer fun I look it up so I can continue.

3: Best game you’ve ever played?

Aaaaaah it's impossible to choose, there's so many good ones, each for different reasons D: I'm gonna take this as "best game" in overall gameplay/story sense and not necessarily my favourite game cause those would be different. So I'll probably go with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. What an absolutely fantastic game. Beautiful stylised graphics, huuge open world that creates a sense of adventure and peaceful exploration, but still lots of fun combat with various enemies and the characters and story are fun too! Fun puzzles as well, but if you get stuck they're no necessary to complete the game so you can just leave and you don't get stuck in the story which is great too. Just a super fun game!!!

5: A popular series/game you just can’t get into no matter how much you try?

I'm gonna say Guild Wars 2, but really it's MMORPGs in general. I want to like them!! The concept of playing with your friends in a big cool fantasy world sounds so fun, and GW2 has some cool races and lore! But I just don't enjoy the repetitive gameplay of getting endless fetch quests or just "Go kill 10 of X enemy" quests. I always stop playing after a while cause the excitement for these games fades super quickly :/ (I also rarely have anyone to play with so that'a another factor)

6: A game that’s changed you the most?

Oooooh boy, here we go. I could write a whole essay on the impact the Dragon Age series has had on my life and me as a person. They're my favourite game series of all time!!! First of all, they're the first proper RPG I ever played, the first time I made my own character that I shaped through the choices in the game, and thus introduced me to the concepts of OCs and roleplaying in general. I might never have gotten into dnd without it bc I don't think I'd really understand how it worked without the introduction to RP through video games first. But more importantly they made me a more empathetic and compassionate person, I think. Or at least more aware of my own compassion. Cause I've always been overly empathetic, but through the choices in the games I became properly aware of that fact and it made me reflect and actively choose empathy and compassion in my own life more. It taught me about compromise, to look for solutions and always ask questions cause there is usually always a third option when both options feel like a bad choice. It also taught me about oppression, in a way school/movies never could. Through the games I sort of experienced what oppression is like for the oppressed, it really gave me an understanding of how harmful slurs and systematic oppression is in a way that just being told about it could never teach me (and definitely not back then when proper education about minorities and oppression was extremely lacking). It was also the first time ever that I saw positive representation of queer people in media?? And they were just there, so matter of factly, no fuss about it. And I remember being so surprised and full of wonder about it, cause at 17 I'd only seen a handful of representation and like 99% of it negative and it was often a BIG deal about it or it was specifically a QUEER story but here was Dragon Age, an epic fantasy game about saving the world from monsters and there were just randomly queer main characters in it, and you could even choose your character to be queer too and it was not negative or made to be weird in any way? Revolutionary for my queer journey let me tell you, even tho I didn't know I was queer myself at the time. This isn't even half of the ways these games have changed me, I think about this world and story literally every day, but this is already way too much text omg, sorry to make you read all this ^^'

[ucflibrary]

Women’s History Month began as a week-long celebration in Sonoma, California in 1978 which was centered around International Women’s Day on March 8. A year later during a women’s history conference at Sarah Lawrence College, participants learned how successful the week was and decided to initiate similar in their own areas. President Carter issued the first proclamation for a national Women’s History Week in 1980. In 1987, Congress (after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project) passed Pub. L. 100-9 designating March as Women’s History Month. U.S. Presidents have issued proclamations on Women’s History Month since 1988.

 The Libraries will be hosting two virtual events to celebrate Women’s History Month for 2021. The first is a talk by Nicholson School of Communication faculty member, Dr. Kimberly Voss, called “Make No Mistake, Florida is Crucial”: Sen. Lori Wilson and the Equal Rights Amendment, which discusses efforts to ratify the ERA in Florida. The second is a panel discussion called Women & Academia in the Time of COVID where five UCF faculty and administrators will discuss the impact of the COVID pandemic and remote learning on their teaching, scholarship, service loads and personal lives. Both events are free and open to the public. Click on the links to register to attend.

 We have created a list of books about women, both history and fiction, suggested by staff. Please click on the read more link below to see the full book list with descriptions and catalog links. And don’t forget to stop by the John C. Hitt Library to browse the featured bookshelf on the main floor near the Research & Information Desk for additional Women’s History Month books.

 A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter Elnora Comstock grows up on the banks of Limberlost Swamp in Indiana with her bitter mother, Katharine. Unable to afford an education, Elnora develops a plan to sell artifacts and moths from the swamp. Suggested by Pat Tiberii, Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Services

 A Woman of No Importance: the untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II by Sonia Purnell Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall--an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. It is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war. Suggested by Dawn Tripp, Research & Information Services

 All the Horrors of War: a Jewish girl, a British doctor, and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by Bernice Lerner Drawing on a wealth of sources, including Hughes's papers, war diaries, oral histories, and interviews, this gripping volume combines scholarly research with narrative storytelling in describing the suffering of Nazi victims, the overwhelming presence of death at Bergen-Belsen, and characters who exemplify the human capacity for fortitude. Lerner, Rachel's daughter, has special insight into the torment her mother suffered. The first book to pair the story of a Holocaust victim with that of a liberator, it compels readers to consider the full, complex humanity of both. Suggested by Katie Kirwan, Acquisitions & Collections

 Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein This book offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But it is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Field o' My Dreams: the poetry of Gene Stratton-Porter compiled and edited by Mary DeJong Obuchowski In her introduction to Porter’s work, Obuchowski argues that the natural and spiritual themes of Porter’s poetry mirror the self-same concerns regarding nature and social issues found in her fiction and nonfiction. Reflecting and in some cases reacting against, current social attitudes at a time of political and demographic change, she was in demand as a columnist for popular magazines and a widely read fiction writer. Porter wielded considerable influence over her reading public, and in that role she acted as a reformer, particularly regarding the environment but also on behalf of women, children, and education. Suggested by Pat Tiberii, Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Services

 Finish the Fight!: the brave and revolutionary women who fought for the right to vote written by the Staff of The New York Times Who was at the forefront of women's right to vote? We know a few famous names, like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but what about so many others from diverse backgrounds—black, Asian, Latinx, Native American, and more—who helped lead the fight for suffrage? On the hundredth anniversary of the historic win for women's rights, it's time to celebrate the names and stories of the women whose stories have yet to be told. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment by Eleanor Clift In this riveting account, political analyst Eleanor Clift chronicles the many thrilling twists and turns of the suffrage struggle and shows how the issues and arguments that surrounded the movement still reverberate today. Beginning with the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848, Clift introduces the movement’s leaders, recounts the marches and demonstrations, and profiles the opposition–antisuffragists, both men and women, who would do anything to stop women from getting the vote. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee Casey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, "But no job and a number of bad habits." Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. This fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910-1928 by Christine A. Lunardini The woman's movements and work in American history during the second two decades, was dramatic. It dealt with the past, with pageants and politics; with different organizations and with conflict from within. It took on the Democrats, founded a National Woman's Party; it waged a home front war. It dealt with prison, and resolution. It went from equal suffrage to equal rights. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Indelicacy by Amina Cain A cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor - social and erotic - but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary? Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 See Jane Win: the inspiring story of the women changing American politics by Caitlin Moscatello After November 8, 2016, first came the sadness; then came the rage, the activism, and the protests; and, finally, for thousands of women, the next step was to run for office—many of them for the first time. More women campaigned for local or national office in the 2018 election cycle than at any other time in US history, challenging accepted notions about who seeks power and who gets it. Journalist Caitlin Moscatello reported on this wave of female candidates for New York magazine's The Cut, Glamour, and Elle. In this book, she further documents this pivotal time in women's history. Closely following four candidates throughout the entire process, from the decision to run through Election Day, readers are taken inside their exciting, winning campaigns and the sometimes thrilling, sometimes brutal realities of running for office while female. Suggested by Megan Haught, Student Learning & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Taking on the Trust: the epic battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller by Steve Weinberg Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller, a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell confronted the company known simply as “The Trust.” Through her peerless fact gathering and devastating prose, Tarbell, a muckraking reporter at McClure’s magazine, pioneered the new practice of investigative journalism. Her shocking discoveries about Standard Oil and Rockefeller led, inexorably, to a dramatic confrontation during the opening decade of the twentieth century that culminated in the landmark 1911 Supreme Court antitrust decision breaking up the monopolies and forever altering the landscape of modern American industry. Suggested by Dawn Tripp, Research & Information Services

 The Book of Gutsy Women: favorite stories of courage and resilience by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, share the stories of the gutsy women who have inspired them—women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. Ensuring the rights and opportunities of women and girls remains a big piece of the unfinished business of the twenty-first century. While there's a lot of work to do, we know that throughout history and around the globe women have overcome the toughest resistance imaginable to win victories that have made progress possible for all of us. That is the achievement of each of the women in this book. To us, they are all gutsy women -- leaders with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. So in the moments when the long haul seems awfully long, we hope you will draw strength from these stories. Because if history shows one thing, it's that the world needs  gutsy women. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 The Good Fight by Shirley Chisholm Chisholm describes being the first woman, and first black woman, to run for President, and how politicians operate. She writes about her relationships with black political leaders Walter Fauntroy, Louis Stokes, Ron Dellums, and Julian Bond. She gives her views on what direction black politics should take in the years to come. Suggested by Megan Haught, Student Learning & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Unapologetic: a Black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements by Charlene A. Carruthers Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Carruthers challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. She offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. Suggested by Megan Haught, Student Learning & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal In this retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in modern-day Pakistan, Alys Binat has sworn never to marry--until an encounter with one Mr. Darsee at a wedding makes her reconsider. A scandal and vicious rumor in the Binat family have destroyed their fortune and prospects for desirable marriages, but Alys, the second and most practical of the five Binat daughters, has found happiness teaching English literature to schoolgirls. Knowing that many of her students won't make it to graduation before dropping out to marry and start having children, Alys teaches them about Jane Austen and her other literary heroes and hopes to inspire them to dream of more. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections