Freedom Human

We live in a time where controversy seems to be the currency of conversation. People disagree not because they truly hold opposing views, but because they feel compelled to take a side, any side, simply for the sake of argument. Discourse has become a battlefield, where winning is prioritized over understanding. It’s disheartening.

Author Byron Williams has written one of the most compelling books of 2023. Through the use of short stories and nonfiction essays, Our American Experiment offers a searing exploration of present-day America, while allowing room for the listener to draw his or her own conclusions.

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how and why we have come to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights. Using rich archival sources and oral interviews, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler shows how the private lives of women and men in the American Civil Liberties Union shaped their understanding of sexual rights as they built the constitutional foundation for the twentieth-century's sexual revolutions.

Tanya Talaga, the best-selling author of Seven Fallen Feathers and the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples - youth suicide.

Written in 1791 as a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is a seminal work on human freedom and equality. Using the French Revolution and its ideals as an example, he demonstrates his belief that any government must put the inherent rights of its citizens above all else, especially politics.

At what point do you stand up to power? Age 14, Joshua Wong made history. While the adults stayed silent, Joshua staged the first ever student protest in Hong Kong to oppose National Education - and won. Since then Joshua founded Demosisto, led the Umbrella Revolution and spearheaded the Extradition Bill protests, which have seen an estimated 2 million people - more than a quarter of the population - take to Hong Kong’s streets. His actions have sparked worldwide attention, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and over 100 days in jail.

After decades of significant progress, the prospects of women and girls in Afghanistan are once again dependent on radical Islamists who reject gender equality. When the United States announced the end of their twenty-year occupation and the Taliban seized control of the country on August 15, 2021, a steep regression of social, political, and economic freedoms for women in the country began. But just because a brutal regime has taken over doesn't mean Afghan women will stand by while their rights are stripped away.

Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope is Professor Falk's first major publication since he completed his term as UN special rapporteur on the situation of the occupied Palestinian territories. In it, he gathers and presents the best of the essays on Palestine that he published on his personal blog in the years 2010-2014, with added commentary that provides a rich metanarrative to the collection.

An urgent, essential, and practical call to action from the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. The climate crisis threatens global social collapse. Within a generation. What to do? Common Sense for the 21st Century outlines how movements around the world now need to come together to start doing "what works". This means engaging in mass civil disobedience to make real change happen. This booklet is not just theory, it is the call to action. The political class is not going to save us from extinction.

In the summer of 2008 Kimberley Motley quit her job as a Criminal Defence Attorney in Milwaukee to join a program to help train lawyers in war-torn Afghanistan. She was 32 years old at the time, a former Mrs Wisconsin (she'd entered the contest on a dare) and a mother of three who had never travelled outside the United States.

Dr. David Dao was dragged off United Express Flight 3411 on April 9, 2017 after refusing to give up his seat. In the tradition of contemporary immigrant stories comes a personal narrative of the many small but significant acts of racial discrimination faced on the way to the American dream.

Inside Syria and Iraq, and even along the refugee trail, they’re a religious minority persecuted for their Christian faith. Outside the Middle East, they’re suspect because of their nationality. A small remnant of Christians is on the run from the Islamic State. If they are wiped out, or scattered to the corners of the earth, the language that Jesus spoke may be lost forever - along with the witness of a church that has modeled Jesus’ way of nonviolence and enemy-love for two millennia.

Donna Solecka Urbikas grew up in the Midwest during the golden years of the American century. But her Polish-born mother and half sister had endured dehumanizing conditions during World War II, as slave laborers in Siberia. War and exile created a profound bond between mother and older daughter, one that Donna would struggle to find with either of them.

There are hundreds of ways to lead a more environmentally friendly, socially conscious, and liberally minded life - ways that can even be enjoyable. Justin Krebs explains that being liberal, or progressive, isn’t only a political act - it’s a lifestyle that’s suited to our changing America.

A proud Gunai/Kurnai woman, Veronica Gorrie grew up dauntless, full of cheek and a fierce sense of justice. After watching her friends and family suffer under a deeply compromised law-enforcement system, Gorrie signed up for training to become one of a rare few Aboriginal police officers in Australia. In her 10 years in the force, she witnessed appalling institutional racism and sexism and fought past those things to provide courageous and compassionate service to civilians in need, many Aboriginal themselves.

During my Scholarly Writing course in law school over the summer (2021), I was "free-writing" on this topic to see if this would be my topic for my paper—instead, I had a conversation with myself, and this is the end result!

In the early days of the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, a 17-year-old girl is arrested because of her brother's involvement with leftist politics. She is placed in a makeshift jail, a former bathhouse, in which other women are also being held captive.

What's a congressman from Virginia doing in places where bullets fly and babies starve? Thirty years ago, Frank Wolf was elected to the U.S. Congress to address local transportation issues. Fueled by a faith that made him believe he could do something about it, the congressman grew to champion human and religious rights around the world---from cracking down on gang-related crimes in the U.S. to relieving suffering from war, AIDS, and famine in places like Darfur, China, and Bosnia.

In early 2019, after more than a year of careful planning, Rahaf Mohammed boarded a plane and finally escaped from Saudi Arabia. If caught, she was sure she would be killed, like other rebel women who had tried to flee her country’s oppressive regime. But the 18-year-old only made it as far as Bangkok before her passport was taken away. It was a trick, and soon she found herself trapped, barricaded in a hotel room.

Even if you're not an activist (yet), at a time when the news is written for clicks and elections are fought with three-word slogans, it's crucial to preserve some record of events that isn't 'fake news' or political spin. In part, this book is my attempt to counter the re-writing of how Australia achieved one of the most significant social changes in a generation. Sally Rugg is one of Australia's most influential campaigners for social change. How Powerful We Are is her manifesto for championing what you believe is right.