Dan-el Padilla Peralta

An undocumented immigrant’s journey from a New York City homeless shelter to the top of his Princeton class Dan-el Padilla Peralta has lived the American dream. As a boy, he came here legally with his family. Together they left Santo Domingo behind, but life in New York City was harder than they imagined. Their visas lapsed, and Dan-el’s father returned home. But Dan-el’s courageous mother was determined to make a better life for her bright sons. Without papers, she faced tremendous obstacles. While Dan-el was only in grade school, the family joined the ranks of the city’s homeless. Dan-el, his mother, and brother lived in a downtown shelter where Dan-el’s only refuge was the meager library. There he met Jeff, a young volunteer from a wealthy family. Jeff was immediately struck by Dan-el’s passion for books and learning. With Jeff’s 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 these 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 could immerse himself in a world of books and where he soon rose to the top of his class. From Collegiate, Dan-el went to Princeton, where he thrived, and where he made the momentous decision to come out as an undocumented student in a Wall Street Journal profile a few months before he gave the salutatorian’s traditional address in Latin at his commencement. Undocumented is a classic story of the triumph of the human spirit. It also is the perfect cri de coeur for the debate on comprehensive immigration reform. Praise for Undocumented “Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s story is as compulsively readable as a novel, an all-American tall tale that just happens to be true. From homeless shelter to Princeton, Oxford, and Stanford, through the grace not only of his own hard work but his mother’s discipline and care, he documents the America we should still aspire to be.” —Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of the New America Foundation

A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League

Undocumented

Robert Graves

Along with I, Claudius, The Golden Fleece is considered one of Robert Graves's most exciting and transporting historical novels. The Golden Fleece was at one time the most sacred religious object of the ancient Greeks, and had been sent away as the result of a power struggle between the Greeks and earlier inhabitants of the Greek peninsula. In this the original quest narrative, Jason leads a voyage of heroes, including his friend Hercules and many others, in his ship the Argo, to recapture the sacred Golden Fleece and bring it home. To do so he must travel across the whole of the ancient world, perform impossible tasks, and undergo betrayals and tragedies beyond comprehension or human endurance. Poet, translator, memoirist, novelist, classicist Robert Graves stands alone for his ability to bring to modern readers the great stories of the ancient world with all their vividness and gore and power intact. As he has shown in many of his 140 published works, his facility with ancient myths and his understanding of how they still inform our imaginative lives helps make The Golden Fleece feel as fresh and necessary today as it did the first time someone told the story of Jason and the Argonauts some three thousand years ago. Seven Stories' Robert Graves Project spans 14 titles, and includes fiction and nonfiction, adult, young adult and children's books, in a striking new uniform design, with new introductions and afterwords. Among the works still to come are Count Belisarius, Hebrew Myths, and Lawrence and the Arabs. The online partner for the Robert Graves Project is RosettaBooks.

The Golden Fleece

An undocumented immigrant’s journey from a New York City homeless shelter to the top of his Princeton class 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 family’s visas lapsed, and Dan-el’s father eventually returned home. But Dan-el’s 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 city’s homeless. Dan-el, his mother, and brother lived in a downtown shelter where Dan-el’s 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-el’s passion for books and learning. With Jeff’s 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 a Wall Street Journal profile a few months before he gave the salutatorian’s 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. Praise for Undocumented: “Undocumented is an impassioned counterargument to those who feel, as did some of Peralta’s more xenophobic classmates, that ‘illegals’ are good-for-nothings who take jobs from Americans and deserve to be kicked out of the country. No one who reads this story of a brilliant young man and his proud mother will automatically equate undocumented immigrant with idle parasite. That stereotype is something else we shouldn’t take for granted.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s story is as compulsively readable as a novel, an all-American tall tale that just happens to be true. From homeless shelter to Princeton, Oxford, and Stanford, through the grace not only of his own hard work but his mother’s discipline and care, he documents the America we should still aspire to be.” —Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of the New America Foundation

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. Divine Institutions 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 period when the Roman state significantly expanded and diversified. Blending the latest advances in archaeology with innovative sociological and anthropological methods, Dan-el Padilla Peralta takes readers from the capitulation of Rome's neighbor and adversary Veii in 398 BCE to the end of the Second Punic War in 202 BCE, demonstrating how the Roman state was redefined through the twin pillars of temple construction and pilgrimage. He sheds light on how the proliferation of temples together with changes to Rome's calendar created new civic rhythms of festival celebration, and how pilgrimage to the city surged with the increase in the number and frequency of festivals attached to Rome's temple structures. Divine Institutions overcomes many of the evidentiary hurdles that for so long have impeded research into this pivotal period in Rome's history. This book reconstructs the scale and social costs of these religious practices and reveals how religious observance emerged as an indispensable strategy for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically.

Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic

Divine Institutions

Matthew P. Loar

Carolyn MacDonald

An interdisciplinary exploration of Roman cultural appropriation, offering new insights into the processes through which Rome made and remade itself.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

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