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Tampa Bay: The Story of an Estuary and Its People (Florida in Focus)
By Evan P. Bennett. 2024
Exploring the environmental history of an important natural area The largest open water estuary in Florida, Tampa Bay has…
been a flashpoint of environmental struggles and action in recent years. This book goes beneath today’s news headlines to explore how people have interacted with nature in the region throughout its long history. In Tampa Bay, Evan Bennett reveals that humans have been part of the bay’s ecology since the estuary took its modern form 2,000 years ago, along with the communities of fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals that proliferated in its seagrass meadows, tidal salt flats, and mangrove forests. Bennett discusses the natural resources that drew people to settle there, the trade that encouraged development, and the shipping and industry that increased biological and ecological change. While the past 150 years have seen serious environmental damage from dredging, water pollution, red tides, and more, Bennett shows how people have been fighting to clean up the bay and regain a balance with nature. Informed by the latest in marine science, area environmentalists, policymakers, and citizens are working to create a model for other societies that have developed in fragile natural areas. The first book to examine the environmental history of the region, Tampa Bay uncovers deep-rooted relationships between water, land, and people and offers hope for bringing threatened coastal spaces back from the brink. A volume in the series Florida in Focus, edited by Andrew K. FrankTripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
By Norman Ohler. 2009
The author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed returns with a provocative new history of drugs and postwar America,…
examining the untold story of how Nazi experiments into psychedelics covertly influenced CIA research and secretly shaped the War on Drugs. Berlin 1945. Following the fall of the Third Reich, drug use—long kept under control by the Nazis’ strict anti-drug laws—is rampant throughout the city. Split into four sectors, Berlin's drug policies are being enforced under the individual jurisdictions of each allied power—the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the US. In the American zone, Arthur J. Giuliani of the nascent Federal Bureau of Narcotics is tasked with learning about the Nazis’ anti-drug laws and bringing home anything that might prove “useful” to the United States.Five years later, Harvard professor Dr. Henry Beecher began work with the US government to uncover the research behind the Nazis psychedelics program. Begun as an attempt to find a “truth serum” and experiment with mind control, the Nazi study initially involved mescaline, but quickly expanded to include LSD. Originally created for medical purposes by Swiss pharmaceutical Sandoz, the Nazis coopted the drug for their mind control military research—research that, following the war, the US was desperate to acquire. This research birthed MKUltra, the CIA's notorious brainwashing and psychological torture program during the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately shaped US drug policy regarding psychedelics for over half a century.Based on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Tripped is a wild, unconventional postwar history, a spiritual sequel to Norman Ohler’s New York Times bestseller Blitzed. Revealing the close relationship and hidden connections between the Nazis and the early days of drugs in America, Ohler shares how this secret history held back therapeutic research of psychedelic drugs for decades and eventually became part of the foundation of America’s War on Drugs.What Was the Great Molasses Flood of 1919? (What Was?)
By Kirsten Anderson, Who Hq. 2024
Learn about Boston's molasses disaster of 1919, when a storage tank burst and flooded the streets, in this latest addition…
to the New York Times Bestselling What Was? series.An unusually warm winter day resulted in 2.3 million gallons of molasses flooding the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The disaster killed twenty-one people and injured 150 others. Rescue missions were launched to save people from the sticky and deadly mess, led by the Red Cross, the Army, the Navy, and the Massachusetts Nautical School. With the help of hundreds of volunteers over the course of several weeks, the streets were cleaned up. But the smell of molasses and the horror of the preventable tragedy lingered for decades to come.What Were the Shark Attacks of 1916? (What Was?)
By Nico Medina, Who Hq. 2024
The panic-filled summer of 1916, when multiple deadly shark attacks shocked the nation, is chronicled in this gripping addition to…
the New York Times Best-Selling What Was? series.On July 1, 1916, witnesses watched in horror as twenty-eight-year-old Charles Vansant was attacked and killed by a shark in shallow water off Beach Haven, New Jersey—the first recorded shark attack in American history. Scientists claimed a shark could not be responsible, but more deadly attacks soon followed along the Jersey Shore and up the freshwater Matawan Creek, setting off a nationwide panic that led the White House to declare a &“War on Sharks.&” In this illustrated book, which features 16 pages of black-and-white photographs, readers will learn about the likely culprit (or culprits) in the attacks—the great white shark and the bull shark—and how the bloody summer of 1916 would change how people viewed sharks forever.Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality
By Jeffrey S. Adler. 2024
A searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of law enforcement in the United States. Too often,…
scholars and pundits argue either that police violence against African Americans has remained unchanged since the era of slavery or that it is a recent phenomenon and disconnected from the past. Neither view is accurate. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show, in narrative detail, how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans. Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Adler explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terror explores both the rise of these law-enforcement trends and their chilling resilience, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow law enforcement continues to haunt the nation.In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to…
cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco
By Lindsey Dillon. 2024
Toxic City presents a novel critique of postindustrial green gentrification through a study of Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood…
in San Francisco. As cities across the United States clean up and transform contaminated waterfronts and abandoned factories into inviting spaces of urban nature and green living, working-class residents—who previously lived with the effects of state abandonment, corporate divestment, and industrial pollution—are threatened with displacement at the very moment these neighborhoods are cleaned, greened, and revitalized. Lindsey Dillon details how residents of Bayview-Hunters Point have fought for years for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment to be a reparative process and how their efforts are linked to long-standing struggles for Black community control and self-determination. She argues that environmental racism is part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives and concludes that environmental justice can be conceived within a larger project of reparations.Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present, and Future
By Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry, V. P. Franklin, A. J Davis, Ron Daniels, Jesse Jackson Sr, Danny Glover, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Sheila Jackson Lee, Kamm Howard, Hilary McDonald Beckles, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, National African American Reparations Commission, Adom Gretachew, James B Stewart, Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Brian Jones, Charles P. Henry. 2024
Changes at the global, federal, state, and municipal level are pushing forward the reparations movement for people of African descent.…
The distinguished editors of this volume have gathered works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world. Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent. Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time. Contributors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Hilary McDonald Beckles, Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Chuck Collins, Ron Daniels, V. P. Franklin, Danny Glover, Adom Gretachew, Charles Henry, Kamm Howard, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Sr., Brian Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee, James B. Stewart, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots MovementJackson Hole (Images of America)
By Mr Scott Morris. 2024
The broad valley of Jackson Hole and the ridges and slopes around what would become Jackson, Wyoming, had long been…
a crossroads to the region's Indigenous peoples when fur trappers arrived in the early decades of the 19th century and made Jackson Hole a lynchpin of their continental commerce. Many came and went, but some stayed, with a settlement taking form near the banks of Flat Creek at the base of East Gros Ventre Butte. Small-scale cattle ranching formed the first economic base of this frontier town, but before long, the valley's incomparable elk herds drew market hunters, game wardens, and hunting guides. Jackson became a ski town with turn-of-the-20th-century cross-country skiing, the 1920s and 1930s development of Mount Snow King, and the 1960s opening of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. These years saw the development of an authentic Western skiing culture and demonstrated Jackson's pivot from sleepy frontier town to major logistical hub for recreational visitors. Two beloved national parks just to the north added to the flow of visitors as postwar prosperity funded new road trips and mountain vacations.Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
By Calder Walton. 2023
Foreign Policy Best Book of 2023 Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2023 The &“riveting&” (The Economist), secret story of the…
hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China.Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin&’s means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing &“unprecedented&” about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends. The Cold War started long before 1945. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is a &“deeply researched and artfully crafted&” (Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the US President) story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks being launched woefully unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of Eastern superpowers: Russia&’s past and present and the global ascendance of China. Mining hitherto secret archives in multiple languages, Calder Walton shows that the Cold War started earlier than commonly assumed, that it continued even after the Soviet Union&’s collapse in 1991, and that Britain and America&’s clandestine struggle with the Soviet government provided key lessons for countering China today. This &“authoritative, sweeping&” (Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embers of War) history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War and the unrolling conflict between the United States and China that will dominate the 21st century.Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence: The Diaries of the Moravian Mission to the Iroquois Confederacy, 1745–1755 (Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies)
By Katherine M. Faull and David Minderhout. 2024
Located at the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River, Shamokin was a significant historical settlement…
in the region that became Pennsylvania. By the time the Moravians arrived to set up a mission in the 1740s, Shamokin had been a site of intertribal commerce and refuge for the Native peoples of Pennsylvania for several centuries. It served first as a Susquehannock, then a Shawnee, and then a primarily Lenape settlement and trading post, overseen by the Oneida leader and diplomat Shikellamy.Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence is an annotated translation of the diaries documenting the Moravian mission to the area. Unlike other missions of the time, the Moravians at Shamokin integrated their work and daily life into the diverse cultures they encountered, demonstrating an unusual compromise between the Church’s missionary impetus and the needs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. The diaries counter the dominant vision of the area around Shamokin as a sinister place, revealing instead a nexus of vibrant cultural exchange where women and men speaking Lenape, Mohican, English, and German collaborated in the business of survival at a pivotal time.The Shamokin diaries, which until now existed only in manuscript form in difficult-to-read German script in the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, allow today’s readers to experience the Susquehanna confluence and the rich intercultural exchanges that took place there between Europeans and Native Americans.The Terrible Siren: Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927)
By Emanie Sachs. 2024
As Publishers Weekly noted, “No heroine of any romance ever had a more adventurous career than this unvictorian Victoria.”In Victoria…
Woodhull’s prime during the mid to late 1800s, women were not allowed to vote, were not encouraged to run a business, and certainly did not speak of free love, much less get divorced. Women endured other ridiculous conventions, like not being seen outside a home after dark without an escort. Restaurants refused to serve single women after 6pm.Victoria Woodhull smashed all these conventions and many more. She married for the first time while only 15 years old. She was married at least 3 times, with 2 divorces.Victoria held seances for Cornelius Vanderbilt to give him tips. With his mentorship, she, along with Tennessee, her equally beautiful sister, opened their own stock brokerage firm and were the first female brokers on Wall Street. One reviewer said it was a time “when a woman in business was as great a novelty as an elephant in a balloon.”The sisters ran a weekly newspaper in New York that ardently advocated for free love. Anthony Comstock sent them to jail for the contents of that paper.Victoria was a skillful orator who pushed for women’s equality, especially suffrage. One reviewer stated, “Audiences came to denounce her and stayed to acclaim her.”She was the first woman to be nominated for President of the United States by a political party. She ran in 3 different elections.She was the first woman to receive an official hearing before a congressional committee, when she presented a memorial about woman suffrage.Victoria unapologetically sought the spotlight and practiced what she preached despite notoriety and persecution.Bamie: Theodore Roosevelt's Remarkable Sister
By Lilian Rixey. 2024
Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth once remarked that if her “Auntie Bye” had been a man, she would have…
been the president.Anna Roosevelt Cowles was Theodore Roosevelt’s older sister by almost four years. She was nicknamed Bamie as a child. Her siblings, nieces, and nephews later called her “Auntie Bye” because she was always on the go.After overcoming a childhood disability, Bamie grew into a tower of strength for her immediate family and supported them throughout her life, especially after her father passed away. She also assisted her extended family at every opportunity.Throughout his life, Bamie was Theodore’s close confidante and political advisor, as well as a guiding force to other family members and friends. She was the only family member to encourage Theodore to enter politics. She planned her brother's political campaigns with Cabot Lodge and other Washington luminaries.She used her charm, perceptive judgment, and extensive contacts on both sides of the Atlantic to promote TR and his policies while and after she served as an unofficial ambassador to England.In Washington, Anna hosted regular luncheons and parties to help Theodore meet people and discuss issues with them. In fact, while he was president, Theodore was so often at his sister’s DC home that it was referred to as “the other White House”. He wrote her weekly letters, explaining he needed her help in clarifying his thoughts.Anna was a history-maker in her own right, helping to establish the US Army’s corps of nurses.Author Lillian Rixey was the grand-niece of TR’s White House physician and a journalist who was given access to unpublished material including a memoir that Bamie wrote for her son.This sparkling biography overflows with personal writings from the close-knit Roosevelt family and quotes from journalists and significant historical figures.Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right
By Neil J. Young. 2024
A revelatory and comprehensive history of the gay Right from incisive political commentator Neil J. Young. One of the…
most maligned, misunderstood, and even mocked constituencies in American politics, gay Republicans regularly face condemnation from both the LGBTQ+ community and their own political party. Yet they’ve been active and influential for decades. Gay conservatives were instrumental, for example, in ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing the legalization of same-sex marriage—but they also helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump. In Coming Out Republican, political historian and commentator Neil J. Young provides the first comprehensive history of the gay Right. From the 1950s up to the present day, Young excavates the multifarious origins, motivations, and evolutions of LGBTQ+ people who found their way to the institutions and networks of modern conservatism. Many on the gay Right have championed conservative values—like free markets, a strong national defense, and individual liberty—and believed that the Republican Party therefore offered LGBTQ+ people the best pathway to freedom. Meanwhile, that same party has actively and repeatedly demonized them. With his precise and provocative voice, Young details the complicated dynamics of being in—and yet never fully accepted into—the Republican Party. Coming Out Republican provides striking insight into who LGBTQ+ conservatives are, what they want, and why many of them continue to align with a party whose rank and file largely seem to hate them. As the Republican Party renews its assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, understanding the significant history of the gay Right has never been more critical.Rethinking U.S. World Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations
By Daniel Bessner, Michael Brenes. 2024
Since the late-1990s, diplomatic historians have emphasized the importance of international and transnational processes, flows, and events to the history…
of the United States in the world. Rethinking U.S. World Power provides an alternative to these scholarly frameworks by assembling a diverse group of historians to explore the impact of the United States and its domestic history on U.S. foreign relations and world affairs. In so doing, the collection underlines that, even in a global age, domestic politics and phenomena were crucial to the history of U.S. foreign policy and international relations more broadly.Pennsylvania Government and Politics: Understanding Public Policy in the Keystone State (Keystone Books)
By Thomas J. Baldino, Paula A. Duda Holoviak. 2024
This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Keystone State’s formal and informal political institutions and players, past and present,…
and elucidates the place each holds in governing the commonwealth today. Covering a period of more than three hundred years, this volume presents a clear and succinct overview of• the commonwealth’s political history, culture, and geography;• interactions between office holders, civil servants, special interest groups, and the media;• policy development and implementation;• how laws are created, enacted, and enforced;• hierarchy and interaction among state, county, local, and special district government bodies and officials;• tax collection and disbursement; and• the political upheaval in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.Featuring practical appendixes and interviews with current and past office holders, bureaucrats, party leaders, and political journalists, this astute and informative book is an indispensable tool for understanding politics in the Keystone State.An Uncommon Woman: The Life of Lydia Hamilton Smith (Keystone Books)
By Mark Kelley. 2023
Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813–1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and…
collaborator of the state’s abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens’s household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries.Born a free woman near Gettysburg, Smith began working for Stevens in 1844. Her relationship with Stevens fascinated and infuriated many, and it made Smith a highly recognizable figure both locally and nationally. The two walked side by side in Lancaster and in Washington, DC, as they worked to secure the rights of African Americans, sheltered people on the Underground Railroad, managed two households, raised her sons and his nephews, and built a real-estate business. In the last years of Stevens’s life, as his declining health threatened to short-circuit his work, Smith risked her own well-being to keep him alive while he led the drive to end slavery, impeach Andrew Johnson, and push for the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.An Uncommon Woman is a vital history that accords Lydia Hamilton Smith the recognition that she deserves. Every American should know Smith’s inspiring story.In this &“gripping . . . spectacular piece of reporting&” (Ken Burns), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines Senator Frank Church,…
the man at the center of numerous investigations into the abuses of power within the American government. For decades now, America&’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power—and winning—in The Last Honest Man. An instant New York Times bestsellerThe New Left and Labor in 1960s (Working Class in American History)
By Peter B. Levy. 1994
It is a powerful story: the relationship between the 1960s New Left and organized labor was summed up by hardhats…
confronting students and others over US involvement in Vietnam. But the real story goes beyond the "Love It or Leave It" signs and melees involving blue-collar types attacking protesters. Peter B. Levy challenges these images by exploring the complex relationship between the two groups. Early in the 1960s, the New Left and labor had cooperated to fight for civil rights and anti-poverty programs. But diverging opinions on the Vietnam War created a schism that divided these one-time allies. Levy shows how the war, combined with the emergence of the black power movement and the blossoming of the counterculture, drove a permanent wedge between the two sides and produced the polarization that remains to this day.America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History
By Organization of American Historians. 2007
Recognizing the urgent need for students to understand the emergence of the United States' power and prestige in relation to…
world events, Gary W. Reichard and Ted Dickson reframe the teaching of American history in a global context. Each essay covers a specific chronological period and approaches fundamental topics and events in United States history from an international perspective, emphasizing how the development of the United States has always depended on its transactions with other nations for commodities, cultural values, and populations. For each historical period, the authors also provide practical guidance on bringing this international approach to the classroom, with suggested lesson plans and activities. Ranging from the colonial period to the civil rights era and everywhere in between, this collection will help prepare Americans for success in an era of global competition and collaboration. Contributors are David Armitage, Stephen Aron, Edward L. Ayers, Thomas Bender, Stuart M. Blumin, J. D. Bowers, Orville Vernon Burton, Lawrence Charap, Jonathan Chu, Kathleen Dalton, Betty A. Dessants, Ted Dickson, Kevin Gaines, Fred Jordan, Melvyn P. Leffler, Louisa Bond Moffitt, Philip D. Morgan, Mark A. Noll, Gary W. Reichard, Daniel T. Rodgers, Leila J. Rupp, Brenda Santos, Gloria Sesso, Carole Shammas, Suzanne M. Sinke, Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Penny M. Von Eschen, Patrick Wolfe, and Pingchao Zhu.