Alamosa Public Library

"Before May 31, 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a thriving neighborhood of 10,000 Black residents. There, Black families found success and community. They ran their own businesses, including barbershops, clothing stores, jewelers, restaurants, movie theaters, and more. There also were Black doctors, dentists, and lawyers to serve the neighborhood. Then, in one weekend, all of this was lost. A racist mob tore through the streets,...

With the Rodney King riots closing in on high school senior Ashley and her family, the privileged bubble she has enjoyed, protecting her from the difficult realities most black people face, begins to crumble.

"When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray wasin a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately...

"Amidst the Chinese-Malay conflict in Kuala Lumpur in 1969, sixteen-year-old Melati must overcome prejudice, violence, and her own OCD to find her way back to her mother"-- Melati Ahmad believes that she harbors a djinn inside her, one who threatens her with horrific images of her mother's death unless she adheres to an elaborate ritual of counting and tapping to keep him satisfied. On the evening of May 13th, 1969, racial tensions in her home city...

"In modern parlance, "Luddite" has come to mean one who rejects modern ways for a simpler time. While the term is bandied about frequently in our technology-saturated age, the historical events in which the expression finds its origin have largely been forgotten." "The Luddite riots, which proved to be one of the defining moments of the Industrial Revolution, began in 1799 when Ned Ludd, a "backward youth," is said to have smashed a knitting frame....

By the author of Patience and Sarah...a long-awaited novel. Lesbian lovers in New York City during the time of Stonewall.

Survivors, observers and expert government officials recount the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility, when a violent five-day standoff between mostly black and latino inmates and law enforcement took place.

" 'If you want to understand the massive anti-racist protests of 2020, put down the navel-gazing books about racial healing and read America on Fire.' -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Library Journal "Books and Authors to Know: Titles to Watch 2021" From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and "riots" that shatters our understanding of the post-civil rights era. What began in spring...

Set against the largest mass lynching in Los Angeles' Chinatown, in 1871, tells a love story of a young Chinese woman, who arrives in California to escape an arranged marriage only to find out that she has been sold to a brothel, and an American-born Chinese cook.

1968: in that single year, MLK and RFK were assassinated, Chicago rioted, Nixon triumphed, and Tet exploded. The top music acts were the Beatles, the Doors, Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. Man circled the Moon. From Civil Rights to Vietnam, from rock & roll to rocket science, 1968 stands out as a concentrated dose of everything we think of as the Sixties.