Baraka Books – förlag

Patriots, Traitors and Empires is an account of modern Korean history, written from the point of view of those who fought to free their country from the domination of foreign empires. It traces the history of Korea’s struggle for freedom from opposition to Japanese colonialism starting in 1905 to North Korea’s current efforts to deter the threat of invasion by the United States or anybody else by having nuclear weapons. Koreans have been fighting a civil war since 1932, when Kim Il Sung, founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, along with other Korean patriots, launched a guerrilla war against Japanese colonial domination. Other Koreans, traitors to the cause of Korea’s freedom, including a future South Korean president, joined the side of Japan’s Empire, becoming officers in the Japanese army or enlisting in the hated colonial police force. From early in the 20th century when Japan incorporated Korea into its burgeoning empire, Koreans have struggled against foreign domination, first by Japan then by the United States. Patriots, Traitors and Empires, The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom is a much-needed antidote to the jingoist clamor spewing from all quarters whenever Korea is discussed.

Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who traveled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and “embrothered the peoples” they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote.Connecting everyday life to the events that emerged as historical turning points in the life of a people, this book sheds new light on Quebec’s 450-year history––and on the historical forces that lie behind its two recent efforts to gain independence.

In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England's burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. Vermette’s groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North American history. He traces individuals and families, from the textile barons who created a new industry to the poor farmers and laborers of Quebec who crowded into the mills in the post-Civil War period. Vermette discusses the murky reception these cross-border immigrants met in the USA, including dehumanizing conditions in mill towns and early-20th-century campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and the Eugenics movement. Vermette also discusses what occurred when the textile industry moved to the Deep South and brings the story of emigrants up to the present day. Vermette shows how this little-known episode in U.S. history prefigures events as recent as yesterday’s news. His well documented narrative touches on the issues of cross-border immigration; the Nativists fear of the Other; the rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.; and the construction of race and ethnicity.

Born during the Great Depression, Jean-Claude Morel is an Everyman, an ordinary Montreal construction worker who has built the city with his own hands, digging its metro, creating islands, and weaving expressways through the downtown core. But the progress has come at a cost: neighbourhoods have been razed, streets wiped off the map, and the Morel family expropriated. Teeming with life, Morel uncovers a story of Montreal that has been buried under years of glitzy urban renewal and modernization. This intricately constructed literary novel is a profoundly human portrait of one man and his time, a monument to a city, and a toast to days gone by.

Connected via the fictional town of St Anne’ s, a community along Nova Scotia’ s western shore, each story takes its title from the children’ s rhyme Counting Crows.One for sorrow, two for joy,three for a message, four for a boy,five for silver, six for gold,seven for a secret never to be told.Within each tale an individual (often from the same family, always from the same town) will note the number of crows in their midst and recall the poem as it relates to the prophecy and the story at hand. Between the last century and the current one, the characters (for the most part, women) walk a shifting landscape carved out by war, poverty, and patriarchal expectations. Beneath the gaze of a small town and these intelligent birds whose memories are unforgiving, we are as close as a heartbeat to the souls upon these pages.

At the age of fifteen, Fred Anderson left home and was sucked into the maelstrom of the U.S. southern civil rights movement. He became active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organization, working with some of the well-known leaders including John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Fanni Lou Hamer and more. As the movement voiced opposition to the Vietnam War and support for liberation movements in Africa and other Third World countries, including Palestine, the FBI targeted it, while military draft boards systemically and disproportionately inducted social activists and poor Blacks, including Fred Anderson. When he refused to go to war, he chose ‘ Flight to Canada,’ where he became Clifford Gaston, the name he went by until the amnesty granted draft dodgers in 1977. Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal is a memoir about embracing the racial and tyrannical crosswinds of Hattiesburg and the south of the 1960’ s and riding the tailwinds of SNCC, civil rights, anti-Vietnam War activism and reimagining the underground railroad to Canada.Little did he know that the internal and public outcomes of the waning Mississippi Freedom

In December 2024, Syria s president Bashar al-Assad departed for Russia after militia forces took Damascus. An Al-Qaeda affiliated group led by Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani took power. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman hooted that it was the biggest most game-changing event in the Middle East in the last 45 years. Yet until then, Al-Jolani was wanted for terrorism and had a U.S. State Department $10 million bounty on his head since 2017. The media-established story of popular rebels triumphing over evil has since dominated. Washington s role in this long-standing regime change operation was erased. This is the first comprehensive account of the U.S. regime change operation in Syria dating back decades. The goal was to end Syria s nationalist economic program, its support for the Palestinians, and its steadfast opposition to U.S. and Israeli hegemonic designs in Western Asia. The methods utilized fit a long-standing U.S. regime-change playbook applied worldwide. Key aspects include a protracted demonization campaign, imposition of crippling economic sanctions, and CIA financing of rebel groups under the billion-dollar Operation Timber-Sycamore.

The Before Columbus Foundation, founded in 1976 by Ishmael Reed and others, is "dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature." It operates on the premise that storytelling traditions existed thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, which counters the myth that storytelling begins with the Puritan settlement. Puritans weren t even the first Europeans to arrive in North America. It founded the American Book Awards in 1978, which has recognized hundreds of writers who otherwise would have been ignored. Its board of directors includes three MacArthur Fellows, three former U.S. Poet Laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, a winner of the Booker Prize, and a recipient of a Presidential medal. BLIND PERSISTENCE is the Before Columbus story as told by a host of leading American poets, novelists, public intellectuals. Contributors include Wajahat Ali, Carolyn Forch , Joy Harjo, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nancy Mercado, Margaret Porter Troupe, Shawn Wong and more

The history of the Montreal Canadiens is not just a story about hockey. It's also the story of how hockey's most legendary team has always skated hand-in-hand with its home province of Quebec. Brendan Kelly takes a fresh look at the ups and downs of the Habs since the heyday of the "Flying Frenchmen" in the '50s, '60s and '70s and shows how the history of the team mirrors the tumultuous changes in Quebec over the past decades. Kelly talks to former Canadiens greats like Serge Savard and Bob Gainey, journalists, politicians, filmmakers and even to Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen, maybe the Canadiens' most famous fan and they tell the tale of a team and its unique bond with its local fans. One surprising conclusion is that when the team's roster was at its most Qu b cois, the team had its greatest success on the ice. Since Montreal's last Quebec superstar, Patrick Roy, was unceremoniously booted out of town, the franchise has failed to win a Stanley Cup and has rarely been amongst the NHL's elite squads.