AP Seminar
All entering 10/11 AP Seminar students will read one book of your choice from the AP Seminar non-fiction list, and complete the assigned tasks.
AP Seminar |
All entering 10/11 AP Seminar students will read one book of your choice from the AP Seminar non-fiction list (below), and complete the assigned tasks.
Steps:
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All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake
by Tiya Miles
"In 1850s South Carolina, just before enslaved nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag - including Rose's message that "It be filled with my Love always." Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose's last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States."
Genre: Biographies; History writing; History writing; Life stories; Family and Relationships
Subjects: African American families, Enslaved people, Family relationships, Material culture, Memory, Mothers and daughters
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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
"Richard Rothstein has painstakingly documented how American cities, from San Francisco to Boston, became so racially divided. Rothstein describes how federal, state, and local governments systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning, public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities, subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs, tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation, and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. He demonstrates that such policies still influence tragedies in places like Ferguson and Baltimore."
Genre: History writing; Society and culture
Subjects: African Americans, Discrimination, Race relations, Racism, Segregation
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Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
by Mary Roach
"Join "America's funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post) Mary Roach on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet. What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A grizzly bear caught breakingand entering? A murderous tree? As New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology."
Genre: Nature Writing; Society and culture; Science Writing
Subjects: Animal behavior, Animals and civilization, Human-animal relationships, Humans and wild animals, Wildlife management
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Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America (20th Anniversary Edition)
by Barbara Ehrenreich
"From the National Book Award–winning author comes a bracingly original approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society—and in ourselves. Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America—but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other."
Genre: Society and culture; Nonfiction that reads like fiction
Subjects: Blue collar workers, Intersectionality, Minimum wage, Poverty, Rent and renting, Working people
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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
"We do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?"
Genre: Society and culture; Politics and global affairs
Subjects: Automobile parking, Infrastructure, Parking lots, Transportation, Urban transportation
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Ruthless Tide: The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster
by Al Roker
"Imagine 14.55 million cubic meters of water from a private human-made lake rushing down a mountainside, laying waste to towns, factories, railroads and homes, and killing 2,209 people after its dam failed from a relentless rainstorm and years of deliberate neglect from corporate greed. While this sounds like the plot of an ecodisaster movie, this "Great Flood" actually occurred in May 1889 in the steel-manufacturing region surrounding Johnstown, PA. NBC's Today show cohost and weatherman Roker recounts the stories of the townspeople who were victims of Gilded Age excess. He details how the flood-prone region's rivers and ecosystem were compromised by factory run-off, excessive development, and the failure of the dam, which also contained the lake at a private fishing resort frequented by business tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. VERDICT Science and American history lovers as well as general readers will find Roker's harrowing tale of survival and loss, which draws from archival resources and oral histories captured in David McCullough's definitive history, The Johnstown Flood, reads like a nail-biting thriller."
Genre: Nature Writing; History writing; Nonfiction that reads like fiction
Subjects: Dams, Floods, Natural disasters
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