Here are 60 books that ReVisioning History fans have personally recommended once you finish the ReVisioning History series.
Shepherd is a community of authors and super-readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I used to think of television as a third parent. As a child of immigrants, I learned a lot about being an American from the media. Soon, I realized there were limits to what I could learn because media and tech privilege profit over community. For 20 years, I have studied what happens when people decide to make media outside of corporations. I have interviewed hundreds of filmmakers, written hundreds of blogs and articles, curated festivals, juried awards, and ultimately founded my own platform, all resulting in four books. My greatest teachers have been artists, healers, and family—chosen and by blood—who have created spaces for honesty, vulnerability, and creative conflict.
This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”
Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.
Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.
She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.
What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
The children and young people who call the U.S. home are increasingly diverse on almost every imaginable identifier. Over the past decade, educators have grown more committed to meeting the distinct needs and potential of every child. This list of books provides insights into why people are so virulently opposed to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
As educational equity researchers and professors, we believe that understanding the recent attacks on DEI is important because it gives readers insights into the longer tradition of opposition to civil rights, equality, and justice for all people. If we can understand the past, we can be prepared to not repeat it.
It’s a common story on local news channels across the U.S: a suburban school board meeting is standing room only.
Parents and community members take turns stepping to the microphone to voice their discontent about something happening in their local schools—a guest speaker who presents Christopher Columbus’ beliefs about Native Americans, a new course advising approach that increases Black and Latino student enrollment in honors and Advanced Placement courses, or the adoption of a new book about growing up that happens to have LGBTQ characters.
Lewis and Diamond’s Despite the Best of Intentions presents data from a 5-year research project that helps readers understand how parents’ and educators’ deep-seated beliefs and fears get in the way of even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned equity efforts.
The book helps readers understand how resistance to DEI is not always loud and boisterous, but it is persistent and wedded to the…
On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?
Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more…
The children and young people who call the U.S. home are increasingly diverse on almost every imaginable identifier. Over the past decade, educators have grown more committed to meeting the distinct needs and potential of every child. This list of books provides insights into why people are so virulently opposed to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
As educational equity researchers and professors, we believe that understanding the recent attacks on DEI is important because it gives readers insights into the longer tradition of opposition to civil rights, equality, and justice for all people. If we can understand the past, we can be prepared to not repeat it.
A teacher in Idaho recently made national headlines when she resisted her district’s order to take down a sign in her classroom that read, “Everyone belongs here.” In designating the sign a political statement that did not belong in the classroom, the district turned media and political debates into real-life implications for children and teachers in classrooms across the country.
Carla Shalaby’s book, Troublemakers, never shies away from the tensions of race, gender, class, and identity as she invites us to see schooling through the eyes of young children who have already been designated “troublemakers” for their behavior.
Through engaging portraits of four children, the book helps readers see how the unquestioned structures and interactions with teachers and schools constrain the creativity, agency, and humanity of young children.
In doing so, she illuminates how deeply the everyday interactions with even our youngest students matter and offers hope for realizing education…
Despite decades of research on classroom management and school discipline, so-called bad behaviour nevertheless persists in every kind of classroom in every kind of school. Even as the harsh disciplining of adolescent behaviour has been called out as part of the school-to-prison pipeline, the diverse 'problem children' in Troublemakers - Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus - reveal how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.
Born on the Navajo reservation and then raised among the Qom, Mocoi, and Pilagá in Argentina, I have been with Native peoples throughout my life. After studying Indigenous and Native American histories at Indiana University, I taught at Kalamazoo and Bates College, where I took students to track and canoe on Penobscot reserves. I write about Guaraní histories and have enjoyed teaching Indigenous, Native, and Latin American histories at Appalachian State University; some of my graduate students are now excellent university professors here in the Southeast. It was for these Indigenous peoples and for my amazing students that I wrote and dedicated my textbook.
Sometimes, research turns up unexpected and inconvenient truths. When Paraguayan anthropologist Canova researched Native voting patterns in Western Paraguay during the last several decades of the nation’s democratic opening, she found that Ayoreo women, from the latest Indigenous nation to be forced off their land, commonly exchanged sex for money or material goods with the local Mennonite setters.
Economic and mission frontiers in the Chaco have changed gender roles, sexual practices, and frontier economies. While I learned about these practices back in 2002 during a trip to the Chaco, this brave exposé of frontier exploitation and changing cultures finally documents and brings to light new understandings of Indigenous agency amidst settler colonialism on internal Latin American frontiers.
Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers.
Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo…
Born on the Navajo reservation and then raised among the Qom, Mocoi, and Pilagá in Argentina, I have been with Native peoples throughout my life. After studying Indigenous and Native American histories at Indiana University, I taught at Kalamazoo and Bates College, where I took students to track and canoe on Penobscot reserves. I write about Guaraní histories and have enjoyed teaching Indigenous, Native, and Latin American histories at Appalachian State University; some of my graduate students are now excellent university professors here in the Southeast. It was for these Indigenous peoples and for my amazing students that I wrote and dedicated my textbook.
I loved this book because it provided a geographic perspective that deepened my understanding of how Native people in the Lower Chaco of Paraguay are mobilizing to reclaim their land. Like Indigenous people throughout the world, the transition to ranching pushed these people off their homelands and made them dispensable peons.
Refusing to give up, the Enxet and Sanapaná employed international advocates to pressure neoliberal politicians to return their lands. I was so impressed by Correia’s years of participant observations and the insights he provides into the Native peoples’ changing world.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
In Paraguay's Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patron traces Enxet and Sanapana struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons-a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay's ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this…
Born on the Navajo reservation and then raised among the Qom, Mocoi, and Pilagá in Argentina, I have been with Native peoples throughout my life. After studying Indigenous and Native American histories at Indiana University, I taught at Kalamazoo and Bates College, where I took students to track and canoe on Penobscot reserves. I write about Guaraní histories and have enjoyed teaching Indigenous, Native, and Latin American histories at Appalachian State University; some of my graduate students are now excellent university professors here in the Southeast. It was for these Indigenous peoples and for my amazing students that I wrote and dedicated my textbook.
This wonderful book collects ethnographies about Indigenous peoples in the Gran Chaco. This beautiful region, where I grew up and currently teach about, links Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil and is home to over twenty-five Indigenous nations.
The Gran Chaco is ecologically important because it is the second-largest biome in Latin America and the site of multiple extractive industries. Ranchers and soy planters are currently deforesting the region at the highest rate in the world and displacing the Indigenous peoples, forcing them into poverty, hunger, and prostitution.
This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region's many indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms.
The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental and NGOs, and private businesses and how local…
Born on the Navajo reservation and then raised among the Qom, Mocoi, and Pilagá in Argentina, I have been with Native peoples throughout my life. After studying Indigenous and Native American histories at Indiana University, I taught at Kalamazoo and Bates College, where I took students to track and canoe on Penobscot reserves. I write about Guaraní histories and have enjoyed teaching Indigenous, Native, and Latin American histories at Appalachian State University; some of my graduate students are now excellent university professors here in the Southeast. It was for these Indigenous peoples and for my amazing students that I wrote and dedicated my textbook.
I have taught with this book so effectively in my classes because it made me realize that Native people all around the world faced similar experiences of colonization, discrimination, and marginalization to those in Latin America.
Indigenous cultures and histories have empowered these people to defend themselves, resist creatively, and shape the states that encapsulated them in important ways.
This book helped me better understand that the Indigenous people I grew up among in Argentina and studied in Paraguay share so much in common with Indigenous peoples throughout the world. Students in my class, A World History of Indigenous Peoples, liked this book because it summarized the subject so well.
A Global History of Indigenous Peoples examines the history of the indigenous/tribal peoples of the world. The work spans the period from the pivotal migrations which saw the peopling of the world, examines the processes by which tribal peoples established themselves as separate from surplus-based and more material societies, and considers the impact of the policies of domination and colonization which brought dramatic change to indigenous cultures. The book covers both tribal societies affected by the expansion of European empires and those indigenous cultures influenced by the economic and military expansion of non-European powers. The work concludes with a discussion…
If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
I can’t take my eyes off this collection of gorgeous historical photographs of affectionate queer couples from 1850 to 1950. Nini and Treadwell scoured libraries and personal collections to create this visual testament to gay love. Their painstaking digitization of often fragile originals created a unique archive, one that we can all share on our coffee tables.
I loved the book so much that I obtained permission from Nini and Treadwell to reprint one of their images as the frontispiece of Fierce Desires! We, too, rarely get to see these snapshots of queer affection, but they are beautiful to behold.
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public.
Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the…
I became aware of the struggles of the LGBTQ community as a 22-year-old touring the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where hundreds of gay men were imprisoned—my mother was a Holocaust survivor who survived Auschwitz. A month later, in October 1978, after I returned to San Francisco, Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered. As a hippie, San Francisco seemed extremely tolerant, but after the murders, I realized there was a monumental struggle for “unalienable rights” in the LGBTQ community. I started photographing LGBTQ political events and, for six years, documented the “gay liberation movement” as it exploded across the streets of New York and San Francisco.
I was overwhelmed with the loving simplicity of this beautifully rendered and highly charged romantic graphic novel. Reading it was akin to watching a film–I was drawn in and held tight until I had finished the last page.
Tender, emotional, cross-cultural, and cross-class, it resonated with me on so many levels but especially reaffirmed my belief that love is possible at any age and despite any obstacle.
Written by black, gay science-fiction writer, professor, and theorist Samuel R. Delany, and drawn by artist/martial arts instructor Mia Wolff, Bread & Wine, based on the poem “Bread and Wine†by the German lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, is a graphic autobiography that flashes back to the unlikely story of how Delany befriended Dennis, and how they became an enduring couple—Delany, a professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, Dennis, an intelligent man living on the streets. For casual readers and fans, Bread & Wine is a moving, sexually charged love story, with visuals informed by Wolff’s professional physical pursuits. Her black-and-white, pen-and-ink…
I became aware of the struggles of the LGBTQ community as a 22-year-old touring the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where hundreds of gay men were imprisoned—my mother was a Holocaust survivor who survived Auschwitz. A month later, in October 1978, after I returned to San Francisco, Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered. As a hippie, San Francisco seemed extremely tolerant, but after the murders, I realized there was a monumental struggle for “unalienable rights” in the LGBTQ community. I started photographing LGBTQ political events and, for six years, documented the “gay liberation movement” as it exploded across the streets of New York and San Francisco.
I was mesmerized by this masterfully written and engrossing page-turner that emotionally landed me in the intimate orbit of Anthony Malone and Andrew Southerland, the book’s two main characters.
Honest and unflinching, it describes a life and culture unknown to me in such a beautiful, romantic way that, although intrinsically tragic, I regretted not being a part of it.
Holleran illuminates a period essential to understanding LGBTQ history, “Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with a moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after what you have dreamed, long for, the face shatters every time.”
'Astonishingly beautiful... The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation' Harpers
'A life changing read for me. Describes a New York that has completely disappeared and for which I longed - stuck in closed-on-Sunday's London' Rupert Everett
Young, divinely beautiful and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight, small town lawyer for the disco-lit decadence of New York's 1970's gay scene. Joining an unbridled world of dance parties, saunas, deserted parks and orgies - at its centre Malone befriends the flamboyant queen, Sutherland, who takes this new arrival under his preened wing.…
