For many it’s the first day of school and we are betting that it looks a lot different than what we all used to. Whether learning in the classroom or from home, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed: the Pratt Library’s commitment to learning.
Here’s a look at a few of the educational resources that the Pratt Library has available. Check them out!
Educational Resources for Middle School. Students can find reference content with videos, newspapers, primary sources and much more by using Gale In Context: Middle School.
With less than 100 days until the 2020 presidential election, Kanopy – the free video streaming resource you can access using your Pratt library card – has curated a collection of films that focuses on history and disenfranchisement as it relates to voting in the United States. Hopefully, watching films like Dark Money,Answering the Call,Beyond Elections, and others from Kanopy will inspire us all to vote and make our voices heard this November! For more information on voting in Maryland, please visit The State Board of Elections website here.
BEYOND ELECTIONS (2008, Credit-free) In 1989, the Brazilian Worker’s Party altered the concept of local government when they installed participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, allowing residents to participate directly in the allocation of city funds. Ten years later, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was swept into power with the promise of granting direct participation to the Venezuelan people; who have now formed tens of thousands of self-organized communal councils. In the Southern Cone, cooperative and recuperated factory numbers have grown, and across the Americas social movements and constitutional assemblies are taking authority away from the ruling elites and putting power into the hands of their members and citizens.
THE CANDIDATES (2018) Since 1996, the student body of Townsend Harris High School has been staging the longest running civics experiment in the form of simulating the American electoral process against the backdrop of the real one. In these elaborate mock elections that span an entire semester, candidates must run the whole gamut of an election Grand simulation replete with fake money, media pundits, campaign ads, debates, electioneering, super PACs, and candidates’ spouses. The Candidates dives into the halls of Townsend Harris High School during the months leading up to the 2016 election.
DARK MONEY (2018) This acclaimed documentary (nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards for the Grand Jury Prize in Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival) examines one of the greatest present threats to American democracy: the influence of untraceable corporate money on our elections and elected officials. The film takes viewers to Montana – a frontline in the fight to preserve fair elections nationwide – to follow a local journalist working to expose the real-life impacts of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
ANSWERING THE CALL (2016) The bloody attacks of protestors in Selma on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965 led to the historic protection of all Americans’ right to vote. This film explores a cherished family story of Selma and the current state of voter suppression in America.
VOTING MATTERS (2018) When a key section of the Voting Rights Act was struck down in 2013, several states with a history of racial discrimination immediately attempted to pass laws that further restricted voter rights. This film follows civil rights attorney Donita Judge as she helps several voters in Ohio cast ballots even though they initially were turned away.
And don’t forget that 2020 is the Women’s Suffrage Centennial year. Celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment that granted women the right to vote by watching these free Kanopy suffrage documentaries.
Pioneering Political Women Long before Kamala Harris became the first Black (and first South Asian) Vice-Presidential candidate, there were other political pioneers of Women’s Rights, such as Shirley Chisolm (the first Black Congresswoman and the first Black woman to run for President) and Elaine Ferraro (the first female Vice-Presidential running mate). Kanopy chronicles their stories in the documentaries below:
Anna Marie R. on The Five by Hallie Rubenhold: If you’re looking for gory true crime murder details this is not your book. Instead, you get a well thought-out history of how Jack the Ripper’s “Five” confirmed victims ended up being where they were when they were killed. Fascinating insights into Victorian mores and a real picture of these women, generally branded “prostitutes,” who had amazing stories. A reminder that no one is worthless.
Shawna P. on Would Like to Meet by Rachel Winters: Want a romance with plenty of humorous, disastrous meet-cutes? Would Like to Meet includes all of that. I loved reading this novel. Evie is so clumsy and forgetful that she is the main character that you would yell at your TV to get her act together. I love Ben and his little girl Anette, the photography and school play scenes were my favorite! And this is the perfect beach/pool read because I read it in two sittings. So fast, and wonderful.
Himani S. on Long Bright River by Liz Moore: Philadelphia, the heroin epidemic of America, the blue code of silence among police officers. These are the threads that run through this fun, quick summer read.
Laura M. on Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix: A unique and modern horror story set in a big box furniture showroom that’s not QUITE like the blue and yellow Swedish one you know. Not for kids, this tale occurs during an overnight shift where Amy and her coworkers realize the consequences of a seance in a store built over the site of a notoriously cruel penitentiary. It will have you looking for your hex wrench to find a way out!
Amy Y. on Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: This is a beautiful novel. It seems maybe a little masochistic reading this in COVID-19 days, but while it alludes to the worst horrors of a pandemic and post-apocalyptic life, this book does not delight in cruelty and focuses more on hopefulness than horror. If anything, living in our current times makes the characters longing for a previous era more poignant. This is a story about the connections we make as humans, about the fragility and resiliency of humanity, about the small things and moments that really matter in the end.
Blindside by James Patterson and James O. Born eBook
He has done it again. This time with his co-author James O. Born, James Patterson, one of the most seemingly inexhaustibly talented fiction writers today, has penned yet another intriguing Detective Michael Bennett mystery. Whether this is the first, or one of many of the Michael Bennett mysteries that you have read, you will not be disappointed.
There is an almost all new cast of characters and multiple storylines. Of course, they all involve Detective Bennett’s policework and his very large non-traditional family (10 adopted children, the oldest who is in prison, a fiancé and grandfather who is a priest). Add to this an unlikable large city mayor and his estranged family in crisis depending on Bennett to successfully resolve the matter; a maniacal technology genius and his band of cut-throat hit men and women, and several other stand alones without whom the plot would not hang together nearly as well were they not thrown in for good measure.
By attacking multiple themes and storylines (police work, the importance and complications of family interactions, the role of spirituality in life, murder, an international hacking operation, use of technological genius for disreputable purposes, and more) the authors spin a tale of intrigue that will keep you riveted to each page of the story from beginning to end. They masterfully weave together the multiple plots seamlessly and skillfully guide the reader through them.
Patterson seems to have an infinite ability to spin tales that are fiction but with just the right amount of contextual facts to make his works totally believable. In this instance his co-author collaborates exceptionally well with this inimitable style of Patterson.
If you are a lover of mystery fiction, this is a book to add to your Summer Challenge reading list. If you have never been a fan of mystery fiction, try reading Blindside and you just might change your mind.
Other novels that may interest you that can be found in the digital collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library as e-books are:
A Brotherhood of Liberty by Dennis Patrick Halpin Book
Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Tech, Dennis Patrick Halpin, has authored a fascinating addition to the Maryland Department’s collection: A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920(UPenn Press, 2019). Halpin’s look at African-American civil rights activism in Baltimore runs from the Reconstruction Era into the Progressive Period, spelling out continuities and highlighting a mostly forgotten cast of characters, whose collective achievements placed Baltimore at the center of those periods’ struggles.
Baltimore, unlike Southern locales in the formerly rebellious states, was not occupied by Federal troops to enforce the mandates of Reconstruction. The need to “self-reconstruct“ spurred activism in Baltimore and forced it along certain paths that later influenced the tactics of civil rights organizations with national scope.
Unlike Black men under Reconstruction, Black men in Maryland did not enjoy suffrage until the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870. The Republican Party in Maryland was happy to receive the votes of newly enfranchised Blacks but did little to advocate for their civil rights or elevate them to important positions within the party. Frustration and disillusionment with the Republicans turned activists away from politics as a viable path forward.
Self-Reconstruction in Baltimore came to embrace legal challenges and peaceful protest as the tools which activists used to carve out civil rights victories. While Reconstruction ended in the South in 1877, Baltimore’s self-reconstruction really got started in the 1880s, a period that historians have usually discounted as regressive.
Before the courts could be used effectively, the Maryland Bar, which in 1872 limited itself to accepting whites only, had to open to African-American attorneys. Halpin details the struggle toward this goal, which once achieved in 1885 for Baltimore, paved the way for further progress.
Harvey Johnson, the pastor of Baltimore’s Union Baptist Church, together with other African-American clergy and attorneys, were the forces behind the activism of the 1880s. Their Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty, Baltimore’s first and one of the Nation’s first civil rights organizations, advocated for increased educational opportunities for black children, supported black labor, and pioneered the use of test cases to integrate public accommodations.
William M. Alexander, pastor at Sharon Baptist, and the attorney, Ashbie W. Hawkins, were important figures in the Brotherhood who carried the struggle forward into the Progressive Period. While this period saw increased democratization in some respects, for example, the direct election of senators and the granting of women’s suffrage, the flip side of the period for African-Americans was the Jim Crow regime. However, black activists in Baltimore successfully contested Jim Crow legislation and by taking important roles in national organizations such as the Saratoga Movement and the nascent NAACP, influenced national activists to adopt their techniques.
In the book’s final chapters, Halpin explores the response of Baltimore’s white community to African-American civil rights victories. Politicians, judges, police, and the popular press reacted to increased black power and pride by launching efforts to control black power and movement based on spurious claims of heightened black criminal activity.
Three times during the first decade of the twentieth century, Maryland attempted to legislate the disenfranchisement of blacks. And three times under Rev. William Alexander’s leadership, using boycotts, protests, and work stoppages, Black Baltimoreans repelled these efforts.
In 1910, Baltimore passed the nation’s first city ordinance mandating residential segregation. Civil Rights Attorney, Ashbie Hawkins, fought the ordinance in Maryland courts but his efforts were rendered mute when the US Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley against a Louisville, KY, residential segregation ordinance modeled after the one in Baltimore. Nevertheless, the NAACP’s house organ, The Crisis, credited Hawkins, who had submitted a brief in Buchanan, as instrumental through his activism in bringing about the ultimate court victory.
If A Brotherhood of Liberty is of interest to you, keep in mind that the Maryland Department holds many books on local African-American history. For example, Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Ivan R. Dee, 2010) by Antero Pietila is an illuminating exploration of residential segregation in Baltimore and nicely compliments Halpin’s later chapters.
