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Lincoln Mediated: The President and the Press Through Nineteenth-Century Media (Journalism Ser.)
By David W. Bulla. 2015
Lincoln Mediated provides new information about a historical figure everyone thinks they know. It describes how Abraham Lincoln worked with…
the press throughout his political career, beginning with his service in Congress in the late 1840s, and detailing how his ties to newspapers in Illinois, New York, and Washington played a central role in the success of his presidency. Gregory A. Borchard and David W. Bulla study how Lincoln used the press to deliver his written and spoken messages, how editors reacted to the president, and how Lincoln responded to their criticism. Reviewing his public persona through the lens of international media and visually based sources, a fascinating profile emerges.The authors cite the papers of Lincoln, the letters of influential figures, and content from leading newspapers. The book also features nineteenth-century illustrations and photographs. Lincoln Mediated ties the president's story directly to the press, illuminating his role as a writer and as a participant in making the news. Lincoln's legacy cannot be understood without understanding the role the press played in helping shape how he was viewed. As the authors show, Lincoln was a man, not just a political figure. Lincoln Mediated is a worthy addition to Transaction's Journalism series.Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle
By Lukas Rieppel. 2019
Lukas Rieppel shows how dinosaurs gripped the popular imagination and became emblems of America’s industrial power and economic prosperity during…
the Gilded Age. Spectacular fossils were displayed in museums financed by North America’s wealthiest tycoons, to cement their reputation as both benefactors of science and fierce capitalists.In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (Stranger Than Ser. #Vol. 8)
By Nathaniel Philbrick. 2000
"With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake…
more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed--at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow..." In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history. In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy. At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history. Winner of the National Book AwardThe library book
By Susan Orlean. 2018
Reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history; chronicles the Los Angeles Public Library fire…
and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. Bestseller. 2018.Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (Early American Studies)
By Jen Manion. 2016
Liberty's Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in…
the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing—women, enslaved people, and indentured servants—increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes.The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the experience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform.Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.Democracy and slavery collided in the early American republic, nowhere more so than in the Democratic-Republican party, the political coalition…
that elected Thomas Jefferson president in 1800 and governed the United States into the 1820s. Joining southern slaveholders and northern advocates of democracy, the coalition facilitated a dramatic expansion of American slavery and generated ideological conflict over slaveholder power in national politics. Slavery was not an exception to the rise of American democracy, Padraig Riley argues, but was instead central to the formation of democratic institutions and ideals.Slavery and the Democratic Conscience explains how northern men both confronted and accommodated slavery as they joined the Democratic-Republican cause. Although many northern Jeffersonians opposed slavery, they helped build a complex political movement that defended the rights of white men to self-government, American citizenship, and equality and protected the master's right to enslave. Dissenters challenged this consensus, but they faced significant obstacles. Slaveholders resisted interference with slavery, while committed Jeffersonians built an aggressive American nationalism, consolidating an ideological accord between white freedom and slaveholder power.By the onset of the Missouri Crisis in 1819, democracy itself had become an obstacle to antislavery politics, insofar as it bound together northern aspirations for freedom and the institutional power of slavery. That fundamental compromise had a deep influence on democratic political culture in the United States for decades to come.Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 (Early American Studies)
By Mark J. Miller. 2016
Derived from the Latin abiectus, literally meaning "thrown or cast down," "abjection" names the condition of being servile, wretched, or…
contemptible. In Western religious tradition, to be abject is to submit to bodily suffering or psychological mortification for the good of the soul. In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres.Miller traces the connection between sentiment, suffering, and publication and the role it played in the movement away from church-based social reform and toward nonsectarian radical rhetoric in the public sphere. He focuses on two periods of rapid transformation: first, the 1730s and 1740s, when new models of publication and transportation enabled transatlantic Protestant religious populism, and, second, the 1830s and 1840s, when liberal reform movements emerged from nonsectarian religious organizations. Analyzing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conversion narratives, personal narratives, sectarian magazines, poems, and novels, Miller shows how church and social reformers used sensational accounts of abjection in their attempts to make the public sphere sacred as a vehicle for political change, especially the abolition of slavery.Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
By T. J. Stiles. 2015
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for HistoryFrom the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, a…
brilliant biography of Gen. George Armstrong Custer that radically changes our view of the man and his turbulent times.In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer's legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer's historical caricature, revealing a volatile, contradictory, intense person--capable yet insecure, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (he was court-martialed twice in six years). The key to understanding Custer, Stiles writes, is keeping in mind that he lived on a frontier in time. In the Civil War, the West, and many areas overlooked in previous biographies, Custer helped to create modern America, but he could never adapt to it. He freed countless slaves yet rejected new civil rights laws. He proved his heroism but missed the dark reality of war for so many others. A talented combat leader, he struggled as a manager in the West. He tried to make a fortune on Wall Street yet never connected with the new corporate economy. Native Americans fascinated him, but he could not see them as fully human. A popular writer, he remained apart from Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and other rising intellectuals. During Custer's lifetime, Americans saw their world remade. His admirers saw him as the embodiment of the nation's gallant youth, of all that they were losing; his detractors despised him for resisting a more complex and promising future. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation in Custer's tumultuous marriage to his highly educated wife, Libbie; their complicated relationship with Eliza Brown, the forceful black woman who ran their household; as well as his battles and expeditions. It casts surprising new light on a near-mythic American figure, a man both widely known and little understood.From the Hardcover edition.1968 was a particularly tumultuous year in American history. The escalating war in Vietnam, the riots during the Democratic Convention,…
and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy left a scar on the national consciousness. But one great battle that took place during this time is barely recalled. The nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court launched an all-out cultural war that would determine the course of major court cases for years to come. Award-winning judicial journalist and Supreme Court reporter Michael Bobelian brings us right into the halls where this fierce battle raged, pitting Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party against Richard Nixon and the GOP in a fight that ended in the defamation of Fortas, the first Jew ever nominated for the highest judicial office. Written in vivid detail, the narrative unfolds in a series of dramatic vignettes, from the landmark ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education to the chaos on the floor of the Democratic Convention. Readers are given a behind the scenes look at the camaraderie among the retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, and Fortas—and will witness, with them, the rise of Richard Nixon as the fate of the liberal court is decided.Who Was P. T. Barnum? (Who Was?)
By Kirsten Anderson, Who Hq. 2019
Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages, step right up for Who HQ's entertaining biography of P. T. Barnum: politician,…
businessman, and The Greatest Showman on Earth!After moving from Connecticut to New York City in 1834, twenty-four-year-old Phineas Taylor Barnum launched his now-legendary career as a showman. Even though spectators debated whether his exhibitions were authentic wonders, hoaxes, or a little bit of both, they were always astounded by what they saw. And readers are sure to be amazed by the story of how Barnum went from owning a museum filled with rare and unusual items to transforming the American circus into a popular and thrilling phenomenon.Conviction: The Murder Trial That Powered Thurgood Marshall's Fight for Civil Rights
By Denver Nicks, John Nicks. 2019
On New Year's Eve, 1939, Elmer Rogers and his wife, Marie, were preparing for bed when a shotgun blast sent…
buckshot deep into Elmer's rib cage. When Marie ran from the room, screaming for help, a second gunshot erupted. The eldest Rogers child grabbed his baby brother and ran while the middle child clung to the bed frame, paralyzed with terror. The intruders poured coal oil around the house and set fire to the front door before escaping. Within a matter of days, investigators identified several suspects: convicts who had been at a craps game with Rogers the night before. Also at the craps game was a young black farmer named W. D. Lyons. As anger at authorities grew, political pressure mounted to find a villain. The governor's representative settled on Lyons, who was arrested, tortured into signing a confession, and tried for the murder. The NAACP's new Legal Defense and Education Fund sent its young chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, to take part in the trial. The NAACP desperately needed money, and Marshall was convinced that the Lyons case could be a fundraising boon for both the state and national organizations. It was. The case went on to the US Supreme Court, and the NAACP raised much-needed money from the publicity. Conviction is the story of Lyons v. Oklahoma, the oft-forgotten case that set Marshall and the NAACP on the path that led ultimately to victory in Brown v. Board of Education and the accompanying social revolution in the United States.VIRAL: The Fight Against Aids In America
By Ann Bausum. 2019
Groundbreaking narrative nonfiction for teens that tells the story of the AIDS crisis in America.Thirty-five years ago, it was a…
modern-day, mysterious plague. Its earliest victims were mostly gay men, some of the most marginalized people in the country; at its peak in America, it killed tens of thousands of people. The losses were staggering, the science frightening, and the government's inaction unforgivable. The AIDS Crisis fundamentally changed the fabric of the United States.Viral presents the history of the AIDS crisis through the lens of the brave victims and activists who demanded action and literally fought for their lives. This compassionate but unflinching text explores everything from the disease's origins and how it spread to the activism it inspired and how the world confronts HIV and AIDS today.America’s Religious Wars: The Embattled Heart of Our Public Life
By Kathleen M. Sands. 2019
How American conflicts about religion have always symbolized our foundational political values When Americans fight about “religion,” we are also…
fighting about our conflicting identities, interests, and commitments. Religion-talk has been a ready vehicle for these conflicts because it is built on enduring contradictions within our core political values. The Constitution treats religion as something to be confined behind a wall, but in public communications, the Framers treated religion as the foundation of the American republic. Ever since, Americans have translated disagreements on many other issues into an endless debate about the role of religion in our public life. Built around a set of compelling narratives—George Washington’s battle with Quaker pacifists; the fight of Mormons and Catholics for equality with Protestants; Teddy Roosevelt’s concept of land versus the Lakota’s concept; the creation-evolution controversy; and the struggle over sexuality—this book shows how religion, throughout American history, has symbolized, but never resolved, our deepest political questions.Award-winning journalist Sam Anderson’s long-awaited debut is a brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City--a great American story of civics, basketball,…
and destiny. Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous "Land Run" in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.Anthem
By Ayn Rand. 2018
Anthem, which was written during a break from the writing of the author’s next major novel, The Fountainhead, presents a…
vision of a dystopian future world in which totalitarian collectivism has triumphed to such an extent that even the word ‘I’ has been forgotten and replaced with ‘we’.The story takes place at an unspecified future date when mankind has entered another Dark Age. Technological advancement is now carefully planned and the concept of individuality has been eliminated. A young man known as Equality 7-2521 rebels by doing secret scientific research. When his activity is discovered, he flees into the wilderness with the girl he loves. Together they plan to establish a new society based on rediscovered individualism.This is the revised version published in 1946, which went on to sell more than 3.5 million copies.Tall Tales of America
By Irwin Shapiro. 2018
This wonderful book is a collection of nine tall tales from America by renowned children’s author Irwin Shapiro: Pecos Bill,…
Anthony and the Mossbunker, Old Stormalong, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, the Yaller Blossom o’ the Forest, Sam Patch’s Last Leap, Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Joe Magarac the Steel Man.Illustrated throughout by Al Schmidt.Horace Greeley and the Tribune in the Civil War
By Dr Ralph Ray Fahrney. 2018
Horace Greeley (1811-1872) was an American author and statesman who was the founder and editor of the New York Tribune,…
among the great newspapers of its time. Born to a poor family in Amherst, New Hampshire, he was apprenticed to a printer in Vermont and went to New York City in 1831 to seek his fortune. In 1941 he founded the Tribune, which became the highest-circulating newspaper in the country through weekly editions sent by mail. Among many other issues, he urged the settlement of the American West, which he saw as a land of opportunity for the young and the unemployed, popularizing the slogan “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” He endlessly promoted utopian reforms such as socialism, vegetarianism, agrarianism, feminism, and temperance, while hiring the best talent he could find.In Horace Greeley and the Tribune, which was first published in 1936, Dr. Fahrney represents thorough research not only in the field of the New York Tribune, but in a great mass of printed material on the war. Well outlined and well written, it should prove both useful to the historian—offering the best guide through the mazes of the shuttlecock, loop-the-loop policy followed by the emotional editor of the Tribune—as well as to the student of journalism, who will find in it an explanation of how the most influential journal of the land in 1861 became one of the most distrusted four years later.Rockefeller “Internationalist”: The Man Who Misrules the World
By Emanuel M. Josephson. 2011
In Rockefeller “Internationalist”: The Man Who Misrules the World, which was first published in 1952, author Emanuel M. Josephson purports…
to expose the global conspiracy between the Rockefeller family and the Axis powers. Alleging that the Rockefeller Institute of Pacific Relations controlled the spy ring responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the author goes to great lengths to describe the links between the Rockefellers and companies such as IG Farben, which supported Hitler’s concentration camps, as well as links between the Rockefeller family and Stalin in an effort to establish a global society.An interesting and important historical document.Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks
By E. Merrill Root. 2018
One third of the Americans taken prisoner in Korea succumbed to Communist brainwashing, according to U.S. Army studies, and assisted…
or collaborated with their captors.The Communist brainwashers recognized and took skillful advantage of the Americans’ ignorance and confusion concerning United States history, the free-enterprise economy, and the representative system of government.Placing the blame squarely on faulty presentation of history and social studies in the American schools, Professor Root, author of the controversial Collectivism on the Campus, examines eleven of the most widely used United States history textbooks. In these books he finds overwhelming evidence of hostility to traditional American principles, of left-wing partisanship and of class-warfare ideology.Professor Root presents the evidence in these pages, and upon it he bases the following conclusions:that American students are indoctrinated with a Marxian concept of United States history...that the present school generation is being conditioned to accept a socialistic and totalitarian way of life...that, as a consequence, resistance to Communist cold-war techniques is being broken down.Brainwashing in the High Schools quotes freely from the eleven textbooks to illustrate their “biased presentation” of American history from the time of the founding Fathers to the mid-twentieth century. The author makes a strong case and suggests radical changes in educational approach if we are to survive as a free nation. His book is essential reading for parents and for every teacher of history and social studies.Hands of Mercy: The Story of Sister-Nurses in the Civil War
By Norah Smaridge. 2018
Six hundred nuns from twelve religious communities served as U.S. Army nurses during the Civil War. They served on the…
battlefield and gave their lives. A group of Sisters of Mercy traveling to St. Louis on a Union steamboat took fire from a Confederate gun battery and worked through it, tending the wounded. At Gettysburg one St. Joseph sister wiped the blood-covered face of a young soldier to discover that he was her 18 year-old brother.When the Sisters of Providence took over the military hospital in Indianapolis during the Civil War, they found that “it was dirty beyond belief. A scouring brigade was formed, and the nuns went down on their knees, scrubbing every inch of the stained and dirty floors. They washed walls and windows, threw out dirty mattresses, and soon had the wards clean and sweet-smelling. Next they set up kitchens, special diet kitchens, and a laundry.”Soldiers, doctors, military officials, civilians—all learned to respect and admire the Sisters, who came to be known as the Sisters of Charity.In the years following the Civil War, nuns established 800 hospitals, the basis for a network of Catholic hospitals that now serves one in six patients, the largest private group in the U.S.This wonderful book by Norah Smaridge provides a glorious in-depth portrait of the many Sister-Nurses during the Civil War years.