Hutchins Library News Blog - Library Homepage at Berea College

Convocation Speaker: Calvin Alexander Ramsey, February 2nd

01/30/2017

Unknown Unknown

Attend Calvin Alexander Ramsey's convocation on

February 2, 2017, 3:00pm

Phelps-Stokes Auditorium

If you liked Mr. Ramsey's presentation, then you'll love these books that we have available for check-out, on display near the cafe!

Belle, the Last Mule at Gee's Bend by Calvin Alexander Ramsey; John Holyfield (Illustrator)

Call Number: R183be 2016

Publication Date: 2016

A true story inspires the moving tale of a mule that played a key role in the civil rights movement-- and a young boy who sees history anew. Sitting on a bench waiting for his mother, Alex spies a mule chomping on greens in someone's garden, and he can't help but ask about it.""Ol Belle?" says Miz Pettway next to him. "She can have all the collards she wants. She's earned it." And so begins the tale of a simple mule in Gee's Bend, Alabama, who played a singular part in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. When African-Americans in a poor community-- inspired by a visit from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-- defied local authorities who were trying to stop them from registering to vote, many got around a long detour on mule-drawn wagons. Later, after Dr. King's assassination, two mules from Gee's Bend pulled the farm wagon bearing his casket through the streets of Atlanta. As Alex looks into the eyes of gentle Belle, he begins to understand a powerful time in history in a very personal way.

The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles; George Ford (Illustrator)

Call Number: C6935s

Publication Date: 1995

The year is 1960, and six-year-old Ruby Bridges and her family have recently moved from Mississippi to New Orleans in search of a better life. When a judge orders Ruby to attend first grade at William Frantz Elementary, an all-white school, Ruby must face angry mobs of parents who refuse to send their children to school with her. Told with Robert Coles' powerful narrative and dramatically illustrated by George Ford, Ruby's story of courage, faith, and hop

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Call Number: 821.914 W898b 2014

Publication Date: 2014

National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.

African Americans, Civil Rights / Race Relations

Convocation Speaker: Jianying Zha, January 26th

01/23/2017

Amanda Peach

0 Comments

Attend Jianying Zha's convocation on

January 26, 2017, 3:00pm

Phelps-Stokes Auditorium

If you liked Ms Jianying Zha's presentation, then you'll love these books that we have available for check-out, on display near the cafe:

China Pop by Jianying Zha

Call Number: 302.2309 Z632c 1995

Publication Date: 1995

From her contact with a group of young novelists, film-makers and artists in China, Zha examines a wide range of developments largely unknown to Western readers: the planning of soap operas to placate popular unrest after Tiananmen; the growth of the sex tabloid and pornography industries; the new generation of entrepreneurs bringing to the mainland the consumer techniques of Hong Kong and the West; and the politics behind the censorship and commercial success of the film directors Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern).

Tide Players by Jianying Zha

Call Number: 951.0609 Z632t 2016

Publication Date: 2013

In Tide Players, acclaimed author Jianying Zha depicts a new generation of movers and shakers who are transforming today’s China. In a half-dozen sharply etched and nuanced profiles, Tide Players captures both the concrete detail and the epic dimension of life in the world’s fastest-growing economy. Zha’s vivid cast of characters includes an unlikely couple who teamed up to become the country’s leading real-estate moguls; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao’s favorite "barefoot doctor” during the Cultural Revolution to a publishing maverick; and a tycoon of home-electronic chain stores who insisted on avenging his mother, who had been executed as "a counterrevolutionary criminal.” Alongside these entrepreneurs, Zha also brings us the intellectuals: a cantankerous professor at China’s top university; a former cultural minister turned prolific writer; and Zha’s own brother, a dissident who served a nine-year prison term for helping to found the China Democracy Party. Zha’s insightful insider-outsider portraits garnered nationwide acclaim, as they offer a picture of a China that few Western readers have seen before.

China's Transformations by Lionel M. Jensen

Call Number: 306.095 C5395 2007

Publication Date: 2006

This successor volume to China beyond the Headlines takes the reader even farther beyond the "front stage" to explore a China few Westerners have seen. The contributors argue that the great gap between what specialists understand and the general public believes has led to distorted and potentially dangerous misunderstandings of the most powerful emerging player on the global stage. Seeking to bridge that gap, a group of prominent scholars, journalists, and activists challenge readers to move past the typical images of China presented by the media and to think about the common problems shared by China and the United States. In an entirely new set of essays, they explore such critical issues as environmental degradation, nationalism, unemployment, film and literature, news reporting, the Internet, sex tourism, and the costs of the economic boom to vividly portray the complexity of life in contemporary China and how surprisingly often it speaks to the American experience.

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Film Screening: "A History of Co-education and Women at Berea College"

01/13/2017

Angel Rivera

0 Comments

Join us for a very special event here at Hutchins Library, Berea College. The details are as follows:

What: film screening of documentary "A History of Co-education and Women at Berea College." Film followed by a Question and Answer session with the film's producer Joel Deutscher, '16.
Where: Hutchins Library, Library Room 107.
When: Thursday, January 19, 2017.
Time: 4:00pm
Need to learn more or have questions? You may contact Dr. Rebecca Bates at rebecca_bates@berea.edu for more information.

Refreshments will be provided.

This event is free and open to the public.

Hutchins Library, History, Berea College

Convocation Speaker: Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, January 16th

01/11/2017

Amanda Peach

0 Comments

Attend the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial convocation on

3:00pm, January 16, 2017

Phelps-Stokes Auditorium

If you liked Dr. Whitehead's presentation, then you'll love her books that we have available for check-out, on display near the cafe:

Notes from a Colored Girl by Karsonya Wise Whitehead

Call Number: 974.811 D261zw 2014

Publication Date: 2014

In Notes from a Colored Girl, Karsonya Wise Whitehead examines the life and experiences of Emilie Frances Davis, a freeborn twenty-one-year-old mulatto woman, through a close reading of three pocket diaries she kept from 1863 to 1865. Whitehead explores Davis's worldviews and politics, her perceptions of both public and private events, her personal relationships, and her place in Philadelphia's free black community in the nineteenth century. Although Davis's daily entries are sparse, brief snapshots of her life, Whitehead interprets them in ways that situate Davis in historical and literary contexts that illuminate nineteenth-century black American women's experiences. Whitehead's contribution of edited text and original narrative fills a void in scholarly documentation of women who dwelled in spaces between white elites, black entrepreneurs, and urban dwellers of every race and class. Notes from a Colored Girl is a unique offering to the fields of history and documentary editing as the book includes both a six-chapter historical reconstruction of Davis's life and a full, heavily annotated edition of her Civil War-era pocket diaries. Drawing on scholarly traditions from history, literature, feminist studies, and sociolinguistics, Whitehead investigates Davis's diary both as a complete literary artifact and in terms of her specific daily entries. From a historical perspective, Whitehead re-creates the narrative of Davis's life for those three years and analyzes the black community where she lived and worked. From a literary perspective, Whitehead examines Davis's diary as a socially, racially, and gendered nonfiction text. From a feminist studies perspective, she examines Davis's agency and identity, grounded in theories elaborated by black feminist scholars. And, from linguistic and rhetorical perspectives, she studies Davis's discourse about her interpersonal relationships, her work, and external events in her life in an effort to understand how she used language to construct her social, racial, and gendered identities. Since there are few primary sources written by black women during this time in history, Davis's diary--though ordinary in its content--is rendered extraordinary simply because it has survived to be included in this very small class of resources. Whitehead's extensive analysis illuminates the lives of many through the simple words of one.

Letters to My Black Sons by Ph D. Karsonya Whitehead

Call Number: 973.049 W592L 2015

Publication Date: 2015

"I want you to be fully present in your own life, a change agent who is not afraid to dare to be who you are. I wonder though, my dear sweet child, how I can mother you when I have not been able to mother myself? How can I give you the tools to survive this brutal world when I have not been able to craft these tools to save myself? How can I stand up for you when my whole life has been spent trying so hard to stand up for myself? I am not perfect. I am flawed. I am pregnant. And in nine months, I will be your mother." And so begins Karsonya Wise Whitehead's first letter to her oldest son. For the past 14 years, she has written letters, poems, notes, and words of inspiration to her two boys, Kofi Elijah and Amir Elisha. She has documented everything from their first steps to their first encounter with racism; from their questions about race to their questions about falling in love. She has borne witness to their tears of joy and pain, their cries of frustration and discovery, and the difficulties that they have encountered growing up black and male. Since this is her love for them poured out onto the page, she chose to publish them exactly as they were written-without any edits or corrections. "Letters to My Black Sons" traces her (and her husband's) journey to try and raise happy and healthy black boys in a post-racial America.

Racebrave by Karsonya Wise Whitehead

Call Number: 821 W592r 2016

Publication Date: 2016

Passionate, edgy, unapologetic... RaceBrave: new and selected works provides another glimpse into Karsonya Wise Whitehead's work to document her experience raising two black boys in a post-racial America. On July 7, 2014, the day Eric Garner was murdered, Whitehead set out to write about what was happening across America to unarmed black people, in doing so she explores the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that resonate with parents around the country-sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness, but always with an ear that bends toward the truth. In marking these moments, Whitehead also reached back into her childhood diaries to examine how life has changed for her, as a writer, a poet, and a mother over the years. RaceBrave is a masterwork that covers multiple topics and captures every mood: today, my heart stopped is both dolorous and heartbreaking as it examines what happens when black men demand the right to be seen and to be able to breathe, while the birth of your activism examines the days leading up the Baltimore Uprising as Whitehead's sons chose to march for ten days straight for justice, for Freddie Grey, and ultimately in search of the world that they are hoping to co-create. Going back into her archives, confederate flag memories highlights Whitehead's feelings about the confederate flag in both 1980 and in 2015 while speaking my truth, finally reveals a story that she has been trying to write about for twenty-five years. In the section, "Black Love is Black Wealth," Whitehead celebrates the many aspects of love with we are gathered, a poem in memory of her favorite uncle; a regenerative descant, in celebration of the retirement of a Marine after thirty-years of service; and, soulmates and soulfood (kuro ai), five short playful tender poems about being brave enough to fall and remain in love. At once personal and political, poignant and apoplectic, these forty-five poems evoke a society where all voices are heard, all perspectives are respected, and everyone has the courage to be RaceBrave.

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