Strong Voices
Fifteen American Speeches Worth Knowing
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Strong Voices: Fifteen American Speeches Worth Knowing is a collection of significant speeches, made both by those who held the reins of power and those who didn’t, at significant times in American history. Read the original words—sometimes abridged and sometimes in their entirety—that have shaped our cultural fabric. A Chicago Public Library Best Book!
"A wide-ranging collection of speeches and a worthwhile resource for students of American history." —Booklist
"A golden celebration of the multicultural voices who demand the U.S.—and the world—do better." —Kirkus
"An important addition to American history collections." —School Library Journal
Introductions by acclaimed writer Tonya Bolden provide historical context and critical insights to the meaning and impact of every speech. Illustrations by award-winning artist Eric Velasquez illuminate what it was really like at each moment in history. This collection includes the following:
Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”George Washington, Farewell AddressRed Jacket, “We Never Quarrel about Religion”Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”Sojourner Truth, “I Am a Woman’s Rights”Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg AddressTheodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic”Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”Lou Gehrig, “Farewell to Baseball”Langston Hughes, “On the Blacklist All Our Lives”John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “We Choose to Go to the Moon”Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream”Fannie Lou Hamer, “I Question America”Cesar Chavez, Address to the Commonwealth Club of California, 1984Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights”
Strong Voices includes a foreword by #1 New York Times bestselling author and celebrated journalist Cokie Roberts, as well as a timeline in the back of the book, along with letters to the reader from Tonya Bolden and Eric Velasquez.
Strong Voices is a tremendous introduction to the extraordinary words spoken in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Listen then to the people who created this country, kept it from disunion, and brought more of its citizens into the fullness of their rights," invites the foreword (by late journalist Cokie Roberts) of this inspirational collection of speeches. Spanning more than 200 years of U.S. history, from Patrick Henry's 1775 "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" speech to Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1995 "Women's Rights Are Human Rights," most of the orations were fervent pleas for social change and equal rights on behalf of marginalized groups, including African-Americans (Frederick Douglass), women (Sojourner Truth), and migrant farm laborers (C sar Chavez). Other inclusions, like President Franklin Roosevelt's, aimed to embolden citizens during difficult socioeconomic times. Velasquez (Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library) provides a striking full-color oil portrait of each orator, preceding the compendium's true value: Bolden's (Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl) contextualization. Bordered by colorful concentric speech bubbles and circles, prologues by Bolden anchor each speech within a historical framework and offer biographical details (e.g., Sojourner Truth renamed herself after escaping from enslavement). A wending timeline concludes this resource, which will resonate with its themes of social justice, political discord, and courage. Ages 8 up.
