Dan-el Padilla Peralta Livres

Dan-el Padilla Peralta has lived the American dream. As a boy, he arrived in the United States legally with his family. Together they had traveled from Santo Domingo to seek medical care for his mother. Soon the familys visas lapsed, and Dan-els father eventually returned home. But Dan-els courageous mother decided to stay and make a better life for her bright sons in New York City. Without papers, she faced tremendous obstacles. While Dan-el was only in grade school, the family joined the ranks of the citys homeless. Dan-el, his mother, and brother lived in a downtown shelter where Dan-els only refuge was the meager library. At another shelter he met Jeff, a young volunteer from a wealthy family. Jeff was immediately struck by Dan-els passion for books and learning. With Jeffs help, Dan-el was accepted on scholarship to Collegiate, the oldest private school in the country. There, Dan-el thrived. Throughout his youth, Dan-el navigated two worlds: the rough streets of East Harlem, where he lived with his brother and his mother and tried to make friends, and the ultra-elite halls of a Manhattan private school, where he immersed himself in a world of books and rose to the top of his class. From Collegiate, Dan-el went on to Princeton, where he made the momentous decision to come out as an undocumented student in aWall Street Journal profile a few months before he gave the salutatorians traditional address in Latin at his commencement. Undocumented is essential reading for the debate on immigration, but it is also an unforgettable tale of a passionate young scholar coming of age in two very different worlds

"How religious ritual united a growing and diversifying Roman Republic. Many narrative histories of Rome's transformation from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean superpower focus on political and military conflicts as the primary agents of social change. Dan-el Padilla Peralta places religion at the heart of this transformation, showing how religious ritual and observance held the Roman Republic together during the fourth and third centuries BCE, a time when the Roman state significantly expanded and diversified. Blending the latest advances in archaeology with innovative sociological and anthropological methods, this incisive book overcomes many of the evidentiary hurdles that for so long have impeded research into this pivotal period in Rome's history. Divine institutions reconstructs the scale and social costs of these religious practices and reveals how religious obserrvance emerged as an indispensable strategy for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically."--Back cover.