← BACK TO LEARNING COMMONS PAGE
Learning Commons
Learning Commons
Learning Commons
Here you will find reading lists that your friendly library staff have curated. These lists reflect the display that is currently up in the Learning Commons. You can find these and other books within the display.
101 Amazing Women
Throughout human history, countless women have made important contributions to society. Some have made scientific discoveries vital to modern-day life, whereas others have fought for human rights, shaped entire countries and broken down barriers. This fascinating book introduces the reader to over one hundred such figures, with each having made important contributions in fields such as politics, science, literature, business and warfare. Women from all historical periods and walks of life are featured, from famous figures in ancient history including Cleopatra and Wu Zetian through to women changing the world today such as Emma Watson and Malala Yousafzai. Whereas the achievements of some of the 101 individuals featured are well known, some readers may be finding out about others for the first time, meaning that the book is also an excellent gateway to further reading.
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart (1897-1937) is specifically written to meet the needs of adolescents and adults who are reluctant readers. The photographs, maps, and illustrations reflect the text, making the words easy to decode. This high-interest, low-vocabulary biography is ideal for English as a Second Language or adult basic education students. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic on June 18-19, 1928. She disappeared in 1937, as she attempted to become the first woman to fly around the world.
The Better Angels
Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Sarah Josepha Hale came from backgrounds that ranged from abject enslavement to New York City's elite. Surmounting social and political obstacles, they emerged before and during the worst crisis in American history, the Civil War. Their actions became strands in a tapestry of courage, truth, and patriotism that influenced the lives of millions--and illuminated a new way forward for the nation. In this collective biography, Robert C. Plumb traces these five remarkable women's awakenings to analyze how their experiences shaped their responses to the challenges, disappointments, and joys they encountered on their missions. Here is Tubman, fearless conductor on the Underground Railroad, alongside Stowe, the author who awakened the nation to the evils of slavery. Barton led an effort to provide medical supplies for field hospitals, and Union soldiers sang Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" on the march. And, amid national catastrophe, Hale's campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday moved North and South toward reconciliation.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has become a world classic--a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annexe" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short. Praise for The Diary of a Young Girl "A truly remarkable book."--The New York Times "One of the most moving personal documents to come out of World War II."--The Philadelphia Inquirer "There may be no better way to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II than to reread The Diary of a Young Girl, a testament to an indestructible nobility of spirit in the face of pure evil."--Chicago Tribune "The single most compelling personal account of the Holocaust . . . remains astonishing and excruciating."--The New York Times Book Review "How brilliantly Anne Frank captures the self-conscious alienation and naïve self-absorption of adolescence."--Newsday
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law
Thomas Byers Memorial Outstanding Publication Award from the University of Akron Law Alumni Association Much has been written about women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Historians have written her biography, detailed her campaign for woman's suffrage, documented her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, and compiled all of her extensive writings and papers. Stanton herself was a prolific author; her autobiography, History of Woman Suffrage, and Woman's Bible are classics. Despite this body of work, scholars and feminists continue to find new and insightful ways to re-examine Stanton and her impact on women's rights and history. Law scholar Tracy A. Thomas extends this discussion of Stanton's impact on modern-day feminism by analyzing her intellectual contributions to--and personal experiences with--family law. Stanton's work on family issues has been overshadowed by her work (especially with Susan B. Anthony) on woman's suffrage. But throughout her fifty-year career, Stanton emphasized reform of the private sphere of the family as central to achieving women's equality. By weaving together law, feminist theory, and history, Thomas explores Stanton's little-examined philosophies on and proposals for women's equality in marriage, divorce, and family, and reveals that the campaigns for equal gender roles in the family that came to the fore in the 1960s and '70s had nineteenth-century roots. Using feminist legal theory as a lens to interpret Stanton's political, legal, and personal work on the family, Thomas argues that Stanton's positions on divorce, working mothers, domestic violence, childcare, and many other topics were strikingly progressive for her time, providing significant parallels from which to gauge the social and legal policy issues confronting women in marriage and the family today.
Elizabeth I
Explore the key life events of Elizabeth I after she ascended the English throne in late 1558. Elizabeth I is arguably one of the greatest monarchs and women of English history. Against an uncertain political and religious backdrop of post-reformation Europe she ruled at the conception of social modernization, living in the shadow of the infamy of her parents reputations and striving to prove herself an equal to the monarchs who had gone before her. This book seeks to explore some of the key events of her life both before and after she ascended to the English throne in late 1558. By looking at the history of these selected events, as well as investigating the influence of various people in her life, this book sets out to explain Elizabeth's decisions, both as a queen and as a woman. Amongst the events examined are the death of her mother, the role and fates of her subsequent stepmothers, the fate of Lady Jane Grey and the subsequent behavior and reign of her half sister Mary Tudor, along with the death of Amy Dudley, the return of Mary Queen of Scots to Scotland, the Papal Bull and the Spanish Amanda.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman's name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children's literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez's comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life--a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women. Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850s and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union Army. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she worked to support an extended family and in her later years founded a home for the indigent aged. Celebrated by her primarily white antislavery associates in a variety of private and public documents from the 1850s through the 1870s, she was rediscovered as a race heroine by woman suffragists and the African American women's club movement in the early twentieth century. Her story was used as a key symbolic resource in education, institutional fundraising, and debates about the meaning of "race" throughout the twentieth century. Humez includes an extended discussion of Tubman's work as a public performer of her own life history during the nearly sixty years she lived in the north. Drawing upon historiographical and literary discussion of the complex hybrid authorship of slave narrative literature, Humez analyzes the interactive dynamic between Tubman and her interviewers. Humez illustrates how Tubman, though unable to write, made major unrecognized contributions to the shaping of her own heroic myth by early biographers like Sarah Bradford. Selections of key documents illustrate how Tubman appeared to her contemporaries, and a comprehensive list of primary sources represents an important resource for scholars.
Jane Austen
An elegant and accessible introduction to the life and works of one of England's greatest and most popular novelists "I want to salute Fiona Stafford's brilliant [book]. . . . It tells one all one needs to know about Jane Austen, and, best of all, leaves one wanting to read the novels once more, and better."--Jane Aiken Hodge Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever since? Why were hers the books that Darwin knew by heart and Churchill read during the Blitz? In this graceful introduction to the author's life and works, Fiona Stafford offers a fresh and accessible perspective, discussing Austen's six astonishing novels in the context of their time. Newly updated, Jane Austen: A Brief Life offers a rich and sympathetic insight into a writer who was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Shelley or Byron--full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai's activism has placed her in grave danger from the Taliban, but she remains determined to defend girls' right to an education around the world. Follow Yousafzai from young blogger to Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie discovered radium and went on to lead the scientific community in studying the theory behind and the uses of radioactivity. She left a vast legacy to future scientists through her research, her teaching, and her contributions to the welfare of humankind. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, yet upon her death in 1934, Albert Einstein was moved to say, "Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted." She was a physicist, a wife and mother, and a groundbreaking professional woman. This biography is an inspirational and exciting story of scientific discovery and personal commitment.
Mother Teresa
In her long life of service, Mother Teresa was responsible for the creation of more than 445 Missions of Charity houses, and was a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. This book offers a pictorial account of Mother Teresa's life and work.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Legacy of Dissent
A rhetorical analysis of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's feminist jurisprudence Ruth Bader Ginsburg's lifelong effort to reshape the language of American law has had profound consequences: she has shifted the rhetorical boundaries of jurisprudence on a wide range of fundamental issues from equal protection to reproductive rights. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ginsburg led a consequential attack on sexist law in the United States. By directly confronting the patriarchal voice of the law, she pointedly challenged an entrenched genre of legal language that silenced the voices and experiences of American women and undermined their status as equal citizens. On the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg continues to challenge the traditional scripts of legal discourse to insist on a progressive vision of the Constitution and to demand a more inclusive and democratic body of law. This illuminating work examines Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's contributions in reshaping the rhetoric of the law (specifically through the lens of watershed cases in women's rights) and describes her rhetorical contributions--beginning with her work in the 1970s as a lawyer and an advocate for the ACLU's Women's Rights Project through her tenure as a Supreme Court justice. Katie L. Gibson examines Ginsburg's rhetoric to argue that she has dramatically shifted the boundaries of legal language. Gibson draws from rhetorical theory, critical legal theory, and feminist theory to describe the law as a rhetorical genre, arguing that Ginsburg's jurisprudence can appropriately be understood as a direct challenge to the traditional rhetoric of the law. Ruth Bader Ginsburg stands as an incredibly important figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminism. While a growing number of admirers celebrate Justice Ginsburg's voice of dissent today, Ginsburg's rhetorical legacy reveals that she has long articulated a sharp and strategic voice of judicial dissent. This study contributes to a more complete understanding of her feminist legacy by detailing the unique contributions of her legal rhetoric.
British Columbia is home to 204 First Nations communities and an amazing diversity of Indigenous languages; approximately 50% of the First Peoples’ languages of Canada are spoken in B.C. To access information on all the First Nations languages and communities in B.C., use the search bar at the top of the page or click on any of the tabs below.
Alego
An enchanting and utterly authentic introduction to the life of an Inuit child and her world. Written and illustrated by Ningiukulu Teevee, one of the most interesting young artists in Cape Dorset, home to the great tradition of Inuit art, this is a beautifully simple story, written in Inuktitut and English, about a young Inuit girl who goes to the shore with her grandmother to collect clams for supper. Along the way she discovers tide pools brimming with life - a bright orange starfish, a creepy-crawly thing with many legs called an ugjunnaq, a hornshaped sea snail and a sculpin. This is an enchanting and utterly authentic introduction to the life of an Inuit child and her world. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.
Alfred Joseph's Walkabout : Ktunaxa Nature Walk
A dictionary book of the Ktunaxa language.
Dancing on Our Turtle's Back
Many promote Reconciliation as a "new" way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance. Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state. Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.
Finding the Language
In this beautifully written story by Adelyn Newman-Ting, we are introduced to Kesugilakw (Kesu) and Bob, who have been friends since they were babies. One day they head out to the forest to play and find themselves in a mysterious place. It is in this place that they meet gwa'wina, a raven, and a wolf named u'ligaan, both of whom can talk and who can understand Kesu and Bob. "The animals explain to the two children how the land created Indigenous languages and how both the land and Indigenous languages are at risk. "The four of them become fast friends and develop a plan to raise awareness with other children in the community about the risk to the land and languages. They bring all the children together and share information about UNESCO and the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goals 4 and 13. Goal 4 seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable high-quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, and SDG 13 asks us all to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Adelyn brilliantly weaves in the importance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. She helps the reader understand the beauty and importance of languages by infusing Kwakwala throughout the story.
Ksanka 'Aʺklukaqwum = Kootenai Dictionary
Kyukyit
A Language of Our Own
The Michif language -- spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada -- is considered an "impossible language" since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.
Meet Cree
Across various regions of Canada, the Cree language is spoken in several dialects that differ from one another in a few sounds and in occasional words. Most examples in the books are given in both Plains and Swampy Cree, which account for at least three-quarters of the total number of Cree speakers. But since all Cree has the same basic structure, speakers of neighbouring dialects have little difficulty in communicating, and the examples apply equally to all dialects of Cree.Meet Cree introduces the reader to the Cree language, mainly by showing how its structure differs from that of English. It does not attempt to teach the Cree language itself, but those who read this book will find it much easier to actually learn Cree afterwards.The book will make Euro-Canadians aware of language differences that are liable to cause misunderstandings, and it will acquaint them with the difficulties faced by Cree speakers when they learn English.The authors introduce the reader to the sounds of Cree, its consonants, vowels, and semivowels. Differences in approach to gender, number, and direction are explored, as are inflections of nouns, pronouns, and verbs. Word "shape," as important in Cree as word order in is English, is explained with many examples, and the book ends with a list of supplementary readings.
My first Métis lobstick = Mon pramyii lobstick
Leah Marie Dorion’s My First Métis Lobstick takes young readers back to Canada’s fur trade era by focusing on a Métis family’s preparations for a lobstick celebration and feast in the boreal forest. Through the eyes of a young boy, we see how important lobstick making and ceremony was to the Métis community. From the Great Lakes to the present-day Northwest Territories, lobstick poles—important cultural and geographical markers, which merged Cree, Ojibway, and French-Canadian traditions—dotted the landscape of our great northern boreal forest. This little known aspect of Métis history vividly comes to life through Leah Marie Dorion’s crisp prose and stunning gallery-quality artwork.
Mācī-Anihšināpēmowin : Beginning Saulteaux
Anihšināpēmowin / Beginning Saulteaux is an introductory look at one of the most widely spoken of all North American Indigenous languages, regionally known as Saulteaux, Ojibway, Ottawa (Odawa), Chippewa, and Algonquian./ In an easy-to-use and easy-to-read series of lessons, both designed for self-study or for use in the classroom, Beginning Saulteaux will guide beginners through the language's grammatical structures and spelling systems, as well as everyday terms and phrases. / The book grounds the language in both traditional and contemporary contexts, and sheds light on the Saulteaux world view. For example, there is no word for good-bye in the language, so upon parting people will usually say Kika-wāpamin mīnawā, meaning “I'll see you again.” / The third in our Indigenous Languages for Beginners series, Beginning Saulteaux is an invaluable resource produced in consultation with Elders, Language Keepers, and community members, and continues our commitment to revitalizing Indigenous languages.
Nakón-I'a Wo! / Beginning Nakoda
Written for beginning learners of Nakoda (also known as Assiniboine), this workbook, arranged thematically, provides a Nakoda/English lexicon, a vocabulary, a table of kinship terms, a glossary of linguistic terminology, and exercises to do after each lesson. This book was made possible with the assistance of Elders and Language Keepers of the Nakoda Nation: Armand McArthur and Wilma Kennedy, Main Consultants; with additional contributions by Pete Bigstone, Leona Kroscamp, Freda O'Watch, and Ken Armstrong.
Nuki?ni Kakaquxmaqa ?Akica?in(One Green Tree)
This 16 page full colour primer is intended to teach colours and numbers in the critically endangered and isolated Ktunaxa language.
Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision
This book seeks to clarify postcolonial Indigenous thought beginning at the new millennium. It represents the voices of the first generation of global Indigenous scholars and converges those voices, their analyses, and their dreams of a decolonized world. -- Marie Battiste, Author. The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an International Summer Institute held in 1996 on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples. The contributors, primarily Indigenous, unravel the processes of colonization that enfolded modern society and resulted in the oppression of Indigenous peoples. The authors -- among them Gregory Cajete, Erica-Irene Daes, Bonnie Duran and Eduardo Duran, James Youngblood Henderson, Linda Hogan, Leroy Little Bear, Ted Moses, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith, Graham Hingangaroa Smith, and Robert Yazzie -- draw on a range of disciplines, professions, and experiences. Addressing four urgent and necessary issues -- mapping colonialism, diagnosing colonialism, healing colonized Indigenous peoples, and imagining postcolonial visions -- they provide new frameworks for understanding how and why colonization has been so pervasive and tenacious among Indigenous peoples. They also envision what they would desire in a truly postcolonial context. In moving and inspiring ways, Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision elaborates a new inclusive vision of a global and national order and articulates new approaches for protecting, healing, and restoring long-oppressed peoples, and for respecting their cultures and languages.
Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 Re Stsq'ey's-kucw
Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws is a journey through the 10,000-year history of the Interior Plateau nation in British Columbia. Told through the lens of past and present Indigenous storytellers, this volume detail how a homeland has shaped Secwépemc existence while the Secwépemc have in turn shaped their homeland. Marianne Ignace and Ronald Ignace, with contributions from ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, archaeologist Mike Rousseau, and geographer Ken Favrholdt, compellingly weave together Secwépemc narratives about ancestors' deeds. They demonstrate how these stories are the manifestation of Indigenous laws (stsq'ey') for social and moral conduct among humans and all sentient beings on the land, and for social and political relations within the nation and with outsiders. Breathing new life into stories about past transformations, the authors place these narratives in dialogue with written historical sources and knowledge from archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, earth science, and ethnobiology. In addition to a wealth of detail about Secwépemc land stewardship, the social and political order, and spiritual concepts and relations embedded in the Indigenous language, the book shows how between the mid-1800s and 1920s the Secwépemc people resisted devastating oppression and the theft of their land, and fought to retain political autonomy while tenaciously maintaining a connection with their homeland, ancestors, and laws. An exemplary work in collaboration, Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws points to the ways in which Indigenous laws and traditions can guide present and future social and political process among the Secwépemc and with settler society.
Think Indian: Languages are Beyond Price
"Think Indian" bumper stickers pleaded and advocated in the 60's, "Think Indian." And while the plea may have been intended for general consideration, it represented in many instances a personal appeal for the exercise of a greater degree or intensity of Indianness, particularly by those who were prevented, for a variety of reasons, from practicing real Indianness.
A Voice Great Within Us
Skookum, cultus, hyack, saltchuck, klahowya, tillicum: It is in words like these that the last vestiges of a lost British Columbian language remain. It was known as "Chinook." Its use today is mainly confined to colloquialisms, and place names like Boston Bar, Canim Lake, Illahee Mountain, Snass Creek, and Skookumchuck. It began as a trading jargon, but it soon evolved into a distinct West Coast tongue. Down through the years, as many as a quarter of a million people relied on it. Chinook was an everyday necessity. A Voice Great Within Us consists of an introductory essay by Glavin exploring the development and spread of Chinook throughout the West Coast, and the place it continues to have in our history; the Chinook poem, "Rain Language"; Lillard's own essay on the part that Chinook played in his own life and exploration of British Columbia. In addition, A Voice Great Within Us includes a lexicon containing hundreds of Chinook words and expressions and a map and gazetteer of British Columbia, showing eighty Chinook place names in this province. A Voice Great Within Us is number 7 in the Transmontanus series.
W^askahikaniwiyiniw-^acimowina = stories of the House People
This remarkable book contains the transcript of a storytelling session held at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in Saskatoon, Canada in 1982. The two speakers were Peter Vandall and Joe Douquette, elders of the Cree Indian people. "Stories of the House People" is a record of these two men, their community, and their language.