Ocean State Libraries

"In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social-media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. To many, especially those in the media, Black Lives Matter appeared to burst onto the national political landscape out of thin air. But as Barbara Ransby shows in Making All Black Lives Matter, the movement...

In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings...

"Ayn Rand's complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure followed her beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially--but not only--those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. Mean Girl traces the posthumous appeal and influence of Rand's novels...

"The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. The debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, Rosemarie Zagarri explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution...

This book is the first dedicated volume of academic analysis on the monumental work of Elena Ferrante, Italy's most well-known contemporary writer. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins brings together the most exciting and innovative research on Ferrante's treatment of the intricacies of women's lives, relationships, struggles, and dilemmas to explore feminist theory in literature; questions of gender in twentieth-century Italy;...