by Public Service Associate Juliana
Welcome to our yearly round up! Each December it’s become Bexley Library tradition to collect a sampling of our favorite releases from the past 12 months. We hope this year’s compilation inspires you this holiday season! For even more great recommendations, listen to our recent podcast episode, “Best of 2021!”
by Adult Services Library Associate Nichole
As 2020 comes to a close, I asked staff to reflect on their favorites books, movies, and albums from this year. Some staff found it easy to narrow it down, while others couldn’t choose just one! Here are the BPL staff favorite books of 2020:
Our favorite films from 2020 include:
And finally, our BPL staff favorite albums from 2020 include:
by Local History Librarian David Distelhorst
Dressed in the costume of an English Militant Suffragette, Mrs William Drake Hamilton, the former Ann Eliza Deshler, attended a celebration carrying a can of nitroglycerin, bricks, and bombs. Her husband, Dr. William Drake Hamilton, dressed as a “suffrage sympathizer,” carried a vote for women banner.
It was the 1910s and Ann Hamilton and her sister, Miss Martha Deshler, members of the Taxpayers’ League, an organization seeking equal suffrage, were among Bexley’s women in the fight for full enfranchisement. The daughters of Deshler Bank President John G. Deshler, whose home was at the corner of Parkview and East Broad Street, hosted suffrage meetings and dignitaries in Hamilton’s Bexley home.
The sisters, among those successful at petitioning Ohio’s Fourth Constitutional Convention to put the issue of equal suffrage before the voters, lost their fight in 1912, and when the votes were tallied Bexley proved “a non-suffrage town.”
Again, two years later, Ohio voters said no, but another Bexley pair had their eyes on a national amendment. Miss Florence Ralston, daughter of Ralston Steel Car Company President Joseph S. Ralston, who like the Hamilton’s lived on East Broad Street in Bexley, joined the College Equal Suffrage League as a student at Ohio State. In 1916 Florence and her mother attended the formation, in Washington D.C, of the National Women’s Party.
The mother and daughter pair were among those representing the local branch of the National Women’s Party at a 1918 meeting with then Senator Warren G. Harding at Columbus’ Southern Hotel. Though Harding did not fully commit to suffrage attendees were “encouraged” that a federal amendment would pass.
That October Senator Harding voted in favor of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, as he did in February and June of the following year. Ratified by the Ohio legislature on June 16, 1919 the women’s right to vote saw final ratification as the 19th Amendment in August of 1920.
For more about the history of the Women’s Suffrage Movement explore these titles recommended by Adult Services Librarian Sue Shipe-Giles:
Research for this article contributed by Scott King-Owen, Ph.D, Teacher, Bexley City Schools.
by Adult Services Librarian Sue Shipe-Giles
Raising my two multiracial children for the past twenty-plus years has proved challenging. During this time, we have each encountered a variety of discrimination and misunderstandings. I have been ostracized by other school moms and even harassed by an employer once they met my husband. My son was bullied starting in preschool, while my daughter has had to “prove” on many occasions to classmates, and once even to a teacher, that her dad is really her father.
Sarah M. Broom’s debut memoir and 2019 National Book Award winner, The Yellow House, tells a hundred years of her family’s story and their relationship to home in New Orleans. Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, purchased a shotgun house in New Orleans East as a young widow and mother with insurance money. She remarried Simon Broom, and their combined family eventually included twelve children. Six months after Sarah was born, Simon passed away suddenly, leaving Ivory Mae to care for their large family and small home on her own. The Yellow House went into disrepair while Sarah was growing up, and it was finally destroyed when Hurricane Katrina swept through the city. Broom’s mother, siblings, and other family members survived, but most were then scattered throughout the country during evacuation efforts. Sarah and one of her sisters were living in Harlem at the time, and they could only watch the devastation on television while worrying about the safety of their loved ones.
Educated is the award-winning autobiographical story of Tara Westover and her journey away from her survivalist Mormon family living on a secluded Idaho mountain called Buck’s Peak.