Washoe County Library System

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

"A gripping oral history of the white nationalist riots that shook the nation and signaled the arrival of a galvanizing new era, told from the perspective of the anti-racist activists who fought back"-- "A gripping account of racial justice activists who confronted violent white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA, and stirred the nation On August 11 and 12, 2017, armed neo-Nazi demonstrators descended on the University of Virginia campus and downtown...

"From the American Revolution to Black Lives Matter, Americans have come to associate freedom with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. Few ideas are as central to the national mythos. But whenever the federal government has taken a stand for racial minorities, however halfhearted, white Americans have been quick to weaponize the concept of freedom, framing the state itself as a tyrannical obstacle to their own liberties. In Freedom's Dominion,...

A searing account of the horrific events that began on January 7, 2015, when two brothers, members of Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, stormed into the Paris offices of the satiric weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Killing eleven people and injuring eleven others before also killing a French police officer outside, this documentary recalls the horror of the attacks, as well as the courage and resilience of police and Parisian citizens...

"“A must-read…It reveals important truths.” ―Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer “One of the finest books on information security published so far in this century―easily accessible, tightly argued, superbly well-sourced, intimidatingly perceptive.” ―Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures Cyber attacks are less destructive than we thought they would be―but they are more pervasive, and much harder to prevent. With little fanfare and only...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer examines life and moral evolution of Abraham Lincoln and how he navigated the crises of slavery, secession and war by both marshaling the power of the presidency while recognizing its limitations. "Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how-and why-he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of...

"The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least...

"What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives--to see that feminism is for everybody"--

Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein's three-part, six-hour documentary series examines how the American people and leaders responded to one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century, and how this catastrophe challenged America's identity as a nation of immigrants and the very ideals of democracy. The U.S. and the Holocaust examines America's response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century....