Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday in the United States observed on the third Monday of January each year. King was chief spokesperson for nonviolent activism in the Civil Rights Movement, which protested racial discrimination in federal and state law and civil society. The movement led to several groundbreaking legislative reforms in the United States.
Izola Curry was a woman who attempted to assassinate the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. She stabbed King with a letter opener at a Harlem book signing on September 20, 1958, during the Harlem civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. King survived Curry's attempt.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is a national memorial located in West Potomac Park next to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It covers four acres (1.6 ha) and includes the Stone of Hope, a granite statue of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. carved by sculptor Lei Yixin. The inspiration for the memorial design is a line from King's "I Have a Dream" speech: "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." The memorial opened to the public on August 22, 2011, after more than two decades of planning, fundraising, and construction.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson by the American writer Robert Caro. Four volumes have been published, running to more than 3,000 pages in total, detailing Johnson's early life, education, and political career. A fifth volume is expected to deal with the bulk of Johnson's presidency and post-presidential years. The series is published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is a 2003 historical non-fiction book by Erik Larson presented in a novelistic style. Set in Chicago during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it tells the story of World’s Fair architect Daniel Burnham and of H. H. Holmes, a criminal figure widely considered the first serial killer in the United States. Leonardo DiCaprio purchased the film rights in 2010. The concept has since been in development hell.
David Jeffries Garrow is an American author and historian. He wrote the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He also wrote Liberty and Sexuality (1994), a history of the legal struggles over abortion and reproductive rights in the U.S. prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017), and other works.
Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and biographer. He is the author of six books, the most recent being King: A Life (2023), a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
Vauhini Vara is a Canadian and American journalist and author. She has written and edited for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It was written by Coates as a letter to his then-teenage son about his perception of what the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States are. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing his beliefs about what are the ways in which, to him, institutions like schools, the local police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to "disembody" black men and women.
Storyteller TV Distribution Co., LLC, doing business as Amblin Television, is the television production division of Amblin Partners. It was established in 1984 by Amblin Entertainment as a small-screen production arm for Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories anthology series for NBC. The company has produced television series including Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, SeaQuest DSV, ER, Falling Skies, and The Americans.
The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes. The book was a critical and commercial success, hitting the bestseller lists and winning several literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. A TV miniseries adaptation, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, was released in May 2021.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 nonfiction book by American sociologist Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 2007–2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords, many of whom face eviction. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States.
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.
Feel Free: Essays is a 2018 book of essays by Zadie Smith. It was published on 8 February 2018 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. It has been described as "thoroughly resplendent" by Maria Popova, who writes: "Smith applies her formidable mind in language to subjects as varied as music, the connection between dancing and writing, climate change, Brexit, the nature of joy, and the confusions of personhood in the age of social media."
Outline is a novel by Rachel Cusk, the first in a trilogy known as The Outline trilogy, which also contains the novels Transit and Kudos. It was chosen by The New York Times critics as one of the 15 remarkable books by women that are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." The New Yorker has called the novel "autobiographical fiction."
Machines Like Me is the 15th novel by the English author Ian McEwan. The novel was published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape.
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is based on the historic Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and was revealed as highly abusive. A university investigation found numerous unmarked graves for unrecorded deaths and a history into the late 20th century of emotional and physical abuse of students.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a 2018 biography of African American abolitionist, writer, and orator Frederick Douglass, written by historian David W. Blight and published by Simon & Schuster. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History.
The Embrace is a bronze sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas, installed on Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, in December 2022. The artwork commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and depicts four intertwined arms, representing the hug they shared after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The work was created by welding together about 609 smaller pieces. The sculpture has received largely negative responses from critics and the public.
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century is a biography of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover by historian Beverly Gage, first published by Viking Press in 2022. As the first biography of Hoover in 30 years, the 800-page volume uses new sources uncovered by Freedom of Information Act requests.
