Title search results
Showing 19501 - 19520 of 36787 items
Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West
By Cassandra Tate. 2020
A nineteenth-century attack by Native Americans on a Presbyterian mission in what would become the Oregon Territory proved to be…
a turning point in the history of the American West. This book examines the tangled legacy of that event.In 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, devout missionaries from upstate New York, established a Presbyterian mission on Cayuse Indian land near what is now the fashionable wine capital of Walla Walla, Washington. Eleven years later, a group of Cayuses killed the Whitmans and eleven others in what became known as the Whitman Massacre. The attack led to a war of retaliation against the Cayuse; the extension of federal control over the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming; and martyrdom for the Whitmans. Today, the Whitmans are more likely to be demonized as colonizers than revered as heroes. Historian and journalist Cassandra Tate takes a fresh look at the personalities, dynamics, disputes, social pressures, and shifting legacy of a pivotal event in the history of the American West.A &“living&” constitution. Runaway courts. Legislating from the bench. These phrases come up a lot in the national political…
debate. They raise the ire of many Americans. But where did the ideas come from? Why do courts play a role so alien to the one the American Founders outlined? And how did unelected judges gain so much power in our democratic republic? Political scientist and legal philosopher Bradley C. S. Watson provides the answers in this important book. To understand why courts today rule the way they do, Watson shows, you must go back more than a century. You&’ll find the philosophical and historical roots of judicial activism in the late nineteenth century. Watson traces a line from social Darwinism and pragmatism, through the rise of Progressivism, to our situation today. Living Constitution, Dying Faith reveals a radical transformation of American political thought. This ebook features a new introduction examining the latest developments—which only highlight the prescience of Watson&’s arguments.Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope
By Kwame Alexander. 2020
From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that…
cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events. A book in the tradition of James Baldwin&’s &“A Report from Occupied Territory,&” Light for the World to See is a rap session on race. A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to America&’s crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope. Includes an introduction by the author and a bold, graphically designed interior.The Eastern Archaic, Historicized (Issues In Eastern Woodlands Archaeology)
By Kenneth E. Sassaman. 2015
The Eastern Archaic, Historicized offers an alternative perspective on the genesis and transformation of cultural diversity over eight millennia of…
hunter-gatherer dwelling in eastern North America. For many decades, archaeological understanding of Archaic diversity has been dominated by perspectives that emphasize localized relationships between humans and environment. The evidence, shows, however that Archaic people routinely associated with other groups throughout eastern North America and expressed themselves materially in ways that reveal historical links to other places and times. Starting with the colonization of eastern North America by two distinct ancestral lines, the Eastern Archaic was an era of migrations, ethnogenesis, and coalescence—an 8,200-year era of making histories through interactions and expressing them culturally in ritual and performance.On The Rim Of The Caribbean: Colonial Georgia And The British Atlantic World
By Paul M. Pressly. 2013
How did colonial Georgia, an economic backwater in its early days, make its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic…
economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants operated in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents? In On the Rim of the Caribbean, Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger story: how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character. Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution.Attacked at Sea: A True World War II Story of a Family's Fight for Survival (True Rescue Series)
By Michael J. Tougias, Alison O'Leary. 2020
A riveting WWII account of survival at sea—Book 4 in the middle grade True Rescue series from Michael J. Tougias,…
the author of the New York Times bestseller The Finest Hours. On May 19, 1942, during WWII, a U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico stalked its prey fifty miles from New Orleans. The submarine set its sights on the freighter Heredia. Most onboard were merchant seamen, but there were also civilians, including the Downs family: Ray and Ina, and their two children. Fast asleep in their berths, the Downs family had no idea that two torpedoes were heading their way. When the ship exploded, chaos ensued—and each family member had to find their own path to survival. This inspiring historical narrative tells the story of the Downs family as they struggle against sharks, hypothermia, blinding oil, drowning, and dehydration in their effort to survive the aftermath of this deadly attack off the American coast.A Promised Land
By Barack Obama. 2020
A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power…
of democracy In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time: Decoding History's Unsolved Mysteries
By Brad Meltzer. 2020
Master storyteller Brad Meltzer counts down and decodes the world’s top 10 most intriguing conspiracies stories. Wanted: the truth. In…
a riveting collection, Brad Meltzer guides us through the 10 greatest conspiracies of all time, from Leonardo da Vinci’s stolen prophecy to the Kennedy assassination. This richly illustrated book serves up those fascinating, unexplained questions that nag at history buffs and conspiracy lovers: Why was Hitler so intent on capturing the Roman “Spear of Destiny?” Where did all the Confederacy’s gold go? What is the government hiding in Area 51? And did Lee Harvey Oswald really act alone? Meltzer sifts through the evidence, weighs competing theories, separates what we know to be true and what’s still––and perhaps forever––unproved or unprovable, and in the end, decodes the mystery and arrives at the most likely explanation.The Refiner's Fire: Historical Highlights of Missouri
By Alvin R. Dyer. 2020
To members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the state of Missouri is not only a place…
of tragic history, but also one with a glorious future. Here, according to the revelations from the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith, many great events will transpire in the culmination of God's work in the latter-days of man's earth-life existence. To know of this area's history and to visit the places of prophetic historical renown in Jackson, Clay, Caldwell, and Daviess counties in Missouri is to experience a feeling and a sense of the nearness of these mighty events of the future. Maps contained in this volume will help identify the places of historic significance, for those who will visit these places. The numerous photographs, many in full color, will bring a new dimension of the area to those whose only visit may be through this book. All who read this volume will see woven through the historical accounts and the quotations from the revelations of the Lord the thread of divine continuity, and will gain a great sense of urgency about the work, and a desire to be part of the great sense of urgency about the work, and a desire to be part of the great future in the "center place of Zion."Across the Wide Missouri
By Bernard De Voto, Mae Reed Porter. 1947
“Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize, ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI tells the compelling story of the climax…
and decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. More than a history, it portrays the mountain fur trade as a way of business and a way of life, vividly illustrating how it shaped the expansion of the American West.Bernard de Voto (1897 – 1955) winner of the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award, was a renowned scholar-historian of the American West and one of our century’s greatest men of letters.“One of the literary lions of his day.”-Stephen E. Ambrose” —Print ed.A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America
By Greg Robinson. 2009
The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described…
as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes. The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years
By Robert M. Collins. 2007
By the end of the 1980s, the "malaise" that had once pervaded American society was replaced by a renewed sense…
of confidence and national purpose. However, beneath this veneer of optimism was a nation confronting the effects of massive federal deficits, a reckless foreign policy, AIDS, homelessness, and a growing "cultural war." In Transforming America, renowned historian Robert Collins examines the decade's critical and controversial developments and the unmistakable influence of Ronald Reagan. Moving beyond conventional depictions that either demonize or sanctify Reagan, Collins offers fresh insights into his thought and influence. He portrays Reagan as a complex political figure who combined ideological conservatism with political pragmatism to achieve many of his policy aims. Collins demonstrates how Reagan's policies helped to limit the scope of government, control inflation, reduce the threat of nuclear war, and defeat communism. Collins also shows how the simultaneous ascendancy of the right in politics and the left in culture created a divisive legacy. The 1980s witnessed other changes, including the advent of the personal computer, a revolution in information technology, a more globalized national economy, and a restructuring of the American corporation. In the realm of culture, the creation of MTV, the popularity of self-help gurus, and the rise of postmodernism in American universities were the realization of the cultural shifts of the postwar era. These developments, Collins suggests, created a conflict in American society that continues today, pitting cultural conservatism against a secular and multicultural view of the world.Entertaining and erudite, Transforming America explores the events, movements, and ideas that defined a turbulent decade and profoundly changed the shape and direction of American culture and politics.The Grand Portage: A Novel
By Walter O'Meara. 2020
The Grand Portage—The Great Novel of Traders and Trappers in the Northwest 1800-1819.“VIOLENT, BRUTAL AND RAW AS TRADING RUM…A FIRST-RATE…
TALE OF THE FIGHT FOR FURS THAT SENT RUGGED, UNSCRUPULOUS MEN FROM THEIR LAKE SUPERIOR HEADQUARTERS NORTH TO HUDSON'S BAY, THE ARCTIC CIRCLE AND THE PACIFIC COAST.”—Salt Lake Tribune“PRESENTS A SWEEPING PANORAMA OF THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE…THE COLD RIVERS, THE TRAMPLED PORTAGES, THE JOSTLING LIFE OF THE GREAT DEPOTS AND THE LONELY WASTES OF WOODS AND PRAIRIE.”—Chicago TribuneChesapeake Bay and Tidewater
By A. Aubrey Bodine. 2020
Perfect sequel to "My Maryland," Bodine's best-selling pictorial tribute to the Free State, and his latest, "The Face of Maryland."…
But this is more than a sequel: it is the first published photographic documentary of the Bay. A beautiful and graphic story of the "Mediterranean of America"…its tributaries and shores which reach into Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and the District of Columbia.In more than 35 years of capturing the Bay in its many moods, Bodine has made thousands of photographs of this alluring body of water. His finest appear in "Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater.""...more than a collection of superb photographs…a book with a theme, interpreting with fidelity not only the mood but also the meaning and significance of the Chesapeake Bay country."-RACHEL CARSONThai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade
By Peter Maguire. 2014
Located on the left bank of the Chao Phya River, Thailand's capital, Krungthep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and "the…
City of Angels" to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of treasure seekers, from surfers looking to finance their endless summers to wide-eyed hippie true believers and lethal marauders left over from the Vietnam War. Moving a shipment of Thai sticks from northeast Thailand farms to American consumers meant navigating one of the most complex smuggling channels in the history of the drug trade. Many forget that until the mid-1970s, the vast majority of marijuana consumed in the United States was imported, and there was little to no domestic production.Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to document this underground industry, the only record of its existence rooted in the fading memories of its elusive participants. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors recount the buy, delivery, voyage home, and product offload. They capture the eccentric personalities of the men and women who transformed the Thai marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into a professionalized business moving the world's most lucrative commodities, unraveling a rare history from the smugglers' perspective.The Tet Offensive: A Concise History
By James Willbanks. 2007
In the Tet Offensive of 1968, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces launched a massive countrywide attack on South Vietnam.…
Though the Communists failed to achieve their tactical and operational objectives, James Willbanks claims Hanoi won a strategic victory. The offensive proved that America's progress was grossly overstated and caused many Americans and key presidential advisors to question the wisdom of prolonging combat. Willbanks also maintains that the Communists laid siege to a Marine combat base two weeks prior to the Tet Offensive-known as the Battle of Khe Sanh—to distract the United States. It is his belief that these two events are intimately linked, and in his concise and compelling history, he presents an engaging portrait of the conflicts and singles out key problems of interpretation.Willbanks divides his study into six sections, beginning with a historical overview of the events leading up to the offensive, the attack itself, and the consequent battles of Saigon, Hue, and Khe Sahn. He continues with a critical assessment of the main themes and issues surrounding the offensive, and concludes with excerpts from American and Vietnamese documents, maps and chronologies, an annotated list of resources, and a short encyclopedia of key people, places, and events.An experienced military historian and scholar of the Vietnam War, Willbanks has written a unique critical reference and guide that enlarges the debate surrounding this important turning point in America's longest war.Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945
By Thomas Mahnken. 2008
No nation in recent history has placed greater emphasis on the role of technology in planning and waging war than…
the United States. In World War II the wholesale mobilization of American science and technology culminated in the detonation of the atomic bomb. Competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, combined with the U.S. Navy's culture of distributed command and the rapid growth of information technology, spawned the concept of network-centric warfare. And America's post-Cold War conflicts in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan have highlighted America's edge.From the atom bomb to the spy satellites of the Cold War, the strategic limitations of the Vietnam War, and the technological triumphs of the Gulf war, Thomas G. Mahnken follows the development and integration of new technologies into the military and emphasizes their influence on the organization, mission, and culture of the armed services. In some cases, advancements in technology have forced different branches of the military to develop competing or superior weaponry, but more often than not the armed services have molded technology to suit their own purposes, remaining resilient in the face of technological challenges. Mahnken concludes with an examination of the reemergence of the traditional American way of war, which uses massive force to engage the enemy. Tying together six decades of debate concerning U.S. military affairs, he discusses how the armed forces might exploit the unique opportunities of the information revolution in the future.Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals
By Stanley Aronowitz. 2012
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was a pathbreaking intellectual who transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often…
challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Written by Stanley Aronowitz, a leading sociologist and critic of American culture and politics, Taking It Big reconstructs this icon's formation and the new dimension of American political life that followed his work.Aronowitz revisits Mills's education and its role in shaping his outlook and intellectual restlessness. Mills defined himself as a maverick, and Aronowitz tests this claim (which has been challenged in recent years) against the work and thought of his contemporaries. Aronowitz describes Mills's growing circle of contacts among the New York Intellectuals and his efforts to reenergize the Left by encouraging a fundamentally new theoretical orientation centered on more ambitious critiques of U.S. society. Blurring the rigid boundaries among philosophy, history, and social theory and between traditional orthodoxies and the radical imagination, Mills became one of the most admired and controversial thinkers of his time and was instrumental in inspiring the student and antiwar movements of the 1960s. In this book, Aronowitz not only reclaims this critical thinker's reputation but also emphasizes his ongoing significance to debates on power in American democracy.The Americans: A History
By Miriam Greenblatt, Winthrop D. Jordan, John S. Bowes. 1996
This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
By David Stark. 2014
The numbers of farms and farmers on the Great Plains are dwindling. Disappearing even faster are the farm places—the houses,…
barns, and outbuildings that made the rural landscape a place of habitation. Nancy Warner's photographs tell the stories of buildings that were once loved yet have now been abandoned. Her evocative images are juxtaposed with the voices of Nebraska farm people, lovingly recorded by sociologist David Stark. These plainspoken recollections tell of a way of life that continues to evolve in the face of wrenching change.Warner's spare, formal photographs invite readers to listen to the cadences and tough-minded humor of everyday speech in the Great Plains. Stark's afterword grounds the project in the historical relationship between people and their land. In the tradition of Wright Morris, this combination of words and images is both art and document, evoking memories, emotions, and questions for anyone with rural American roots.