October 21, 2023, 10:30am-noon

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Winston Churchill once said, “History is written by the victors,” which is very much the case when one looks at most chronicles of the earliest days of the United States. It has only been in the latter years of the 20th century that a determination for transparency has grown among scholars who have been looking more closely at the accounts of past events that have long been buried in the accepted narrative of Anglo-Saxon-centric American history.

Part Cherokee, Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor in Oklahoma and worked during the 1960s and ‘70s advocating for tribal issues while completing her graduate education in Native American Studies. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States describes and analyzes a four-hundred-year span of complex Indigenous struggles against the colonization of the Americas. The book highlights resultant conflicts, wars, and Indigenous strategies and sites of resistance.

January 6 and 27, 2024, 10:30am-noon

The History of White People

by Nell Irving Painter

A 2010 book by Nell Irvin Painter, in which the author explores the idea of whiteness throughout history, beginning with ancient Greece and continuing through the beginning of scientific racism in early modern Europe to 19th- through 21st-century America.

A New York Times bestseller: “This terrific new book… [explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.”—Boston Globe

March 9, 2024, 10:30am-noon

The Politics of Jesus, Rediscovering  the True Revolutionary Nature of What Jesus Believed and How It Was Corrupted

by Obrey M. Hendricks, Jr.

Hendricks argues that Jesus was a political revolutionary whose teachings and actions were aimed at alleviating the suffering of his people at the hands of Roman occupiers. He doesn’t simply portray Jesus in general political terms; he contends that Jesus was an adept political activist who utilized specific tactics and techniques that we can emulate today.

April 27, 2024, 10:30-noon

Poverty By America
by Matthew Desmond

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER − The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. “Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”

June 8, 10:30-noon

You Sound Like A White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

by Julissa Arce

This is an important book that challenges the idea of American exceptionalism with equal parts passion, fury, intimacy, and ignored history. Arce celebrates the Mexican American immigrant experience in all its vibrancy and nuance while fearlessly naming the pain inflicted by American racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia.